cut

The cut and paste operations are available in a wide variety of different programs and windowing systems. The mechanics of the operation vary a lot, but they all have these things in common:

• The purpose of cutting and pasting is to move or copy text from one place to another.
• For the cut operation, you select a chunk of text, and then cut it. It disappears from there, but it is saved somewhere. The place it is saved is often called the clipboard.
• For the paste operation, you indicate some location, and when you paste, the saved text is inserted there.

Many tools support a third operation called copy. This is like cut, but the text does not disappear from its original location---only a copy of that text goes to the clipboard.

John Shipman, john@nmt.edu Last updated: 1997/05/22 02:55:16 UT URL: http://www.nmt.edu/tcc/help/g/cut.html