The selection mechanism

% ``<#2684#> selection<#2684#>'' is the cut and paste facility for the \ text consoles. The mechanism is mainly handled by a user-level process, which can be instantiated by either <#2685#> selection<#2685#> or <#2686#> gpm<#2686#>. The user-level program uses <#2687#> ioctl()<#2687#> on the console to tell the kernel to highlight a region of the screen. The selected text, then, is copied to a selection buffer. The buffer is a static entity in <#2688#> console.c<#2688#>. Pasting text is accomplished by `manually' pushing characters in the tty input queue. The whole selection mechanism is protected by <#2689#> #ifdef<#2689#> so users can disable it during kernel configuration to save a few kilobytes of RAM. Selection is a very-low-level facility, and its workings are hidden from any other kernel activity. This means that most <#2690#> #ifdef<#2690#>'s simply deals with removing the highlight before the screen is modified in any way.

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