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Comment by sengork | Hacker News Reader

I wish they would finally implement file transfers via copy/paste mechanism inside an active terminal window. As far as I know this feature would be unique across platforms.

If someone does know of an SSH terminal client that does this, please reply.

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Reminds me of the bad old days of kermit and x/y/zmodem. http://www.extraputty.com/features/xmodem.html looks like a throwback to those days, over an ssh session. I wonder what you have to run on the server side for it to work?

Does uuencode or base64 work for you? I use it a lot to move stuff (aka my toolkit) to systems where I'm connected via citrix -> rdp -> ssh -> ssh. Amazingly, it works fine, though it can be slow.

  $uuencode sheet1.xml sheet1.xml | pbcopy

(switch to remote session)

  $uudecode (paste, which varies depending on how I'm connected)

  $ls -l sheet1.xml

Ta-da!

There is another throwback for me here when one of our clients had disabled Citrix file transfers and only allowed text based clipboard (due to imposed security policies).

So we had to:

  - zip a directory hierarchy or a single file uuencode

  - copy to shared clipboard

  - paste into a terminal on the other end using a here document

  - uudecode the output

  - checksum the source/destination copy for file integrity purposes

This worked on Windows too (using Notepad and saving the file as .uu for use with WinZip). Luckily file transfers were not a frequent use case.

I wonder what you have to run on the server side for it to work?

sz(1) I assume (a tool with considerable seniority). Found for example in the lrzsz package on Debian.

EDIT: Realized you wanted to paste a file, instead of drop a file. I'm not really aware of anything that manages that.

This page[1] says SecureCRT can do it, and I saw some things referencing that Konsole can too. I searched for 'drag and drop zmodem' to get started.

[1] https://www.vandyke.com/support/tips/dragdropft.html

How about dragging to the terminal? This is a feature of mobaxterm. Upon ssh'ing to a system, a sftp session is automatically opened as well.

Thanks that's the form of the function I was referring to.

Indeed as previously mentioned there are xmodem/uuencode alternatives but none of them would be as efficient and reliable as native SFTP/SCP.

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