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I copied a large amount of text to the clipboard and then pasted it into the terminal. I didn't realize it would be so large that it would continue filling the screen for ~5 minutes.

ctrl + c seems to work most of the time but not all the time and I couldn't quite get the timing right it seemed.

How can I stop a runaway/rogue clipboard paste from rendering the terminal useless until it is done?

update: I posted an answer below that uses htop to find it and then a SIGINT to kill it but that kills the terminal or pane (tmux) too. Would be nice if it didn't kill/shutdown the process. I tried SIGQUIT (pause), SIGABRT (abort) and SIGHUP (hang up) but no success (it doesn't affect the rogue paste).

update 2: Ahh, in my case it is an HTML paste and ctrl + c is actually working but since their are line break/returns in the paste it is starting a new paste every second or so. So ctrl + c is just affecting the current one. I don't think there is going to be an option in this scenario other than to kill the process with a SIGINT.

Elijah Lynn
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  • You could look at what `irssi` does via `paste_verify_line_count = 2` or such to prevent channel spam on a mis-paste, but that would probably be tricky to code into any arbitrary app or the terminal itself... – thrig Feb 16 '17 at 21:31

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https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7771557/how-to-terminate-a-window-in-tmux You can kill specific panes in Tmux, or put the pane in a screen session and kill it that way. I find that a bit excessive, normally I do a ctrl-s to pause the terminal, then ctrl-c. But being lazy I have a keybinding to xkill and just kill the terminal :-) I know its a sledgehammer to crack a wallnut, but if you use vim, you can recover the session from the swapfile by reopening it again.

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Sarah Thornton
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I ended up launching htop, which put my shell (fish) process at the top of the list, at 137% CPU. Then I killed it by pressing F9 (k also works). I chose the default SIGTERM and it killed the process as expected.

Elijah Lynn
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