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When pasting something to the terminal (especially if it's longer than one line or was copied from an untrusted source), I like this approach:

1. open your terminal emulator;

2. press Ctrl-X + Ctrl-E in a shell prompt;

3. it opens your $EDITOR, paste the command there, check it for anything unusual, then save and exit;

4. the shell runs whatever was in that script you saved.

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Nice, thanks, learned something :)

Tip for Vi/Vim users: to exit without having the command run, exit the editor with failure; the command for that is is :cq in Vim. (Also works fine in git to cancel commits etc.)

Adding for emacs users, the kill-emacs command does the same. I don't think it has a shortcut by default, so it's M-x kill-emacs.

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