Copy append

[bruno9779]

A couple of years ago, while working for IBM I had the pleasure of using the TN3270 Plus terminal emulator.

I loved the copy-append function, that proved to be and amazing productivity booster.

I have been googling for it wide and far, but I cannot find anything similar for Linux (of for any other OS)

Any idea?

[houseworkshy]

Yes that would be handy. Apparantly there are around 600 commands for linux ( mostly not installed by default ) so I don't know if it exists or not. I've added very few so it may. As I haven't used append-copy I may have the wrong idea.

On my mostly default installation "apropos append" didn't find anything in the terminal though "apropos copy" and "apropos merge" pulled a lot. "man cp" is interesting. I'm not sure if the "l" (link) does something similar or not.

If it doesn't then an append switch is such a good idea for cp that, if it doesn't exist, I'd recommend pushing it forward to the development team.

I hope an expert will see this post and either point out the relevant command or know that it doesn't exist and perhaps support a lauchpad idea.

[bruno9779]

It is a simple tool, and a quite old idea, but works great.

In my job I often have to send codes (location codes, mac addresses and so on) to some guy in another dept through the company chat.

It is always the same, 10 or so chunks of data that I have to copy and paste individually.

If copy append was somehow available as in TN3270, I could copy everything and than just paste it once

[houseworkshy]

Now I've got what you mean. There's an itch in the back of my mind that I've seen something like that in linux, related to media I think, but I can't quite dig it out. Maybe if I try to stop trying to remember the niggle will wake me in the night with the answer, sometimes works like that for me. If it does I'll post.

Meanwhile or instead why not define the function as clearly as you can and post it as an idea on http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com Either it will be reviewed and declaired as redundant, in which case as they tell you why you'll know the command, or if liked it will be passed to the development team and sometime soon "cp -append" will apear in a linux terminal near you.

I love open source for that, open to ideas from anyone and develops fast.

[bruno9779]

Here is a link to the help page for copy-append for the TN3270.

http://www.sdisw.com/tn3270/manual/index.html?hid_edit_copy_append.htm

It says :
Use this command to copy the currently selected data and append it to data already on the clipboard. This command is unavailable if no data is currently selected.

I will put an ubuntu brainstorm as soon as I get the time