Pastebin
A pastebin is a web application where you can paste snippets of text, usually source code or log files, for public viewing. It is popular with users of IRC and other chat programs where pasting large amounts of text is considered bad etiquette. There are many different styles of pastebins on the internet. Over time many pastebins have become specialized and have features which cater to a specific audience. Pastes made to pastebins are usually only saved for a short period of time, usually anywhere from a day to a month.
General Instructions
NOTE: Each pastebin is slightly different so individual features will vary.
- Copy (Ctrl + C) the text you want to share into your clipboard.
- Go to an online pastebin and Paste (Ctrl + V) your text into the Content box. Some pastebins have you enter a name and how long you want your post to be retained.
Hit the 'Submit' or 'Send' button. This will generate a page with a url like http://pastebin.com/1234
- Paste the url into an IRC or IM conversation.
- Someone responds by reading and can even submit a modification of your code.
Pastebins
Free, public instance of the open source project of the same name, hosted in Austria. All data encryption/decryption happens client-side (in the browser) before submission to the server using 256-bit AES in Galois Counter mode, obviating the need to create any sort of account to use it, though it ties the "ownership" of each paste to the specific web browser instance used for creation. It offers expiration lengths from 5min to 1yr, optional password protection, threaded discussions per paste, file attachment uploads with automatic image embedding, QR code generation, Markdown formatting and syntax highlighting.
Free, public Python implementation of the ZeroBin open source project. Offers automatic syntax highlighting and several expiration options: burn after reading, 1 day, 1 month or never.
Clients
There are some tools available to help you use pastebins.
Pastebinit a small python script that allows you, from the command line, to simply send whatever you give it to an online pastebin and gives you the URL in return. It's useful when doing IRC support (when you don't want one to paste a 200 lines log) or when working on a command line box with no way to SSH in it. Written by Stéphane Graber
Webboard a GUI and an applet for gnome to simply send the content of your clipboard to a Pastebin website. Written by Sebastian Heinlein