Not an answer to your question but here's a "fun" thing I used to do... If you want to run a program from the CLI, which blocks you terminal (say an xterm), you

Not an answer to your question but here's a "fun" thing I used to do... If you want to run a program from the CLI, which blocks you terminal (say an xterm), you can use that terminal as a temporary paste buffer. But with a trick. Imagine you want to run, say, Firefox like that (say because you'd like to see stdin/stderr output of what's going on without having to find to which log file it's outputting stuff: it's really just a silly example): xterm> firefox <-- the xterm is now "stuck here" (until Firefox exists) if you now write, into that "blocked" xterm, the things you write shall execute when you exit/kill Firefox: Hello, world! But one thing I used to do all the time and still occasionally do, first do this: xterm> firefox <-- the xterm is now "stuck" here (until Firefox exits) cat > /dev/null You can now use that xterm as a temp paste buffer. So, yup, a good old cat > /dev/null works wonder.