Terminal

I needed to upload the contents of a lengthy log file to a site earlier today. There was no option to simply attach the file. I was instead asked to just paste its contents. I suppose that I could have opened the file in an editor like Kate and copied its contents to the clipboard. But I became curious as to the possibility of accomplishing this from within the terminal. A little googling revealed the existence of a utility named xsel for this very purpose.

If you've been working with Linux terminals for a while, you've invariably found that viewing a binary file tends to output a lot of hieroglyphic nonsense (when all you want to do is check its header) and for some petty collateral damage, rapes your screen by changing your command prompt and window title to more of the same gibberish. While a lot of people (*raises hand*) simply accept such rowdy behaviour as one of the vagaries of life and simple open a new terminal window or similar, this - as I found out a few minutes ago - can be fixed.

I work extensively on a Windows desktop. However, I do SSH into Linux servers often and I do so using PuTTY, a free and open source client. Everything works peachy. However, I recently had occasion to work extensively with some Unicode source data and I found that there were times when I thought that there were encoding issues with the data as they were not being displayed correctly on my screen.