urxvt-confirm-paste(1)

urxvt-confirm-paste1

Ask for confirmation before pasting control characters

Overview

Displays a confirmation dialog when a paste containing control characters is detected. The user can choose "y" to either paste a sanitized variant where all control characters are removed, "p" to paste the string unmodified or "n" to drop the paste request completely.

This is mostly meant as a defense-in-depth mechanism to protect against the common web browser bug of you selecting some text but the browser pasting a completely different text, which has some attack potential.

It can also be useful to prevent you from accidentally pasting large amounts of text.

Details

If a string containing unicode control characters (specifically U+0000 .. U+001F currrently) is pasted into the terminal, this extension will ask whether it should be pasted. Strings without control characters get pasted without prompt.

When a sanitized version is pasted (choice "y"), then contiguous sequences of those control characters will be replaced by a single spaces.

The exact detection and sanitization algorithm is subject to change in future versions.

Releases

7 releases since Debian 8 (Jessie); the text changed 6 times.

  1. 8
  2. 9
  3. 10
  4. 11
  5. 12
  6. 13
  7. Arch

From rxvt-unicode 9.31-11 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.