Shortcut For Duplicating Part of a path?

[drlarrye]

I'm working on a puzzle that was traced with Gimp.  It now is a series of lines that have no bearing on individual pieces  ie a line will cross from 1 puzzle piece to another.  I want to make each piece a closed path with the adjoining piece being it's own closed path.  Simple enough so far.  My question is, Is there a way to duplicate a part of a closed path that is shorter than cutting the path at both ends of what I want to duplicate, breaking the path apart, duplicating that part, and then putting the original back together?  I suspect there is not but in the past I have spent a lot of time doing things the hard/long way before asking.

[Moini]

As far as I know, Inkscape does not allow you to copy just a couple of nodes from a path, you always need to copy the whole thing and remove what you don't need, via any means you like (could also be a Boolean operation, if that's faster, or even the eraser tool).