How to copy and paste to and from a PuTTY window

It may not be obvious to you, but it is possible to copy and paste to and from a PuTTY window. This tutorial will show you how to do that

Copying and pasting in PuTTY is very easy, but different from the way it’s done in most other programs

You’ll need to be logged in to a PuTTY session before you begin

All you have to do is left click and drag to make a selection

As soon as you let go of the mouse button, the selection is instantly copied to your clipboard and ready to be pasted

Simply click off of the selection to deselect it

Now, let’s paste the selection into another window. For this tutorial, we’ll just use a Notepad window that we already have open

Right click, then Paste

The selection has been copied and pasted successfully

Now, let’s try copying and pasting an SSH command we’ve stored in a different Notepad window

Right-click and Copy

Return to PuTTY

Simply right-click to paste

Press Enter to execute the command

You can also select and copy a rectangular region in PuTTY. For our purpose, this is useful to copy just the filenames in this directory listing

Hold down ALT, then click and drag from the top left corner to the bottom right

Switch back to Notepad

Press CTRL+V to paste

The rectangular region you copied has been pasted successfully

This completes the tutorial. You should now know how to copy and paste to and from PuTTY