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Pasting inserting extraneous greater than signs

  • 1.  Pasting inserting extraneous greater than signs

    Posted Mon March 09, 2026 10:40 AM

    Dropped all my LPARs of IBM i. (Hence system down)
    Trying to upgrade VIOS from 3.1.50 to 4

    using putty to the hmc then vtmenu

    As part of the process I paste in a big string which starts with
    {
    mkdir /home/padmin/$(hostname).before_migration
    /usr/ios/cli/ioscli lstcpip -stored > /home/padmin/$(hostname).before_migration/lstcpip.txt
    /usr/ios/cli/ioscli lsmap -all > /home/padmin/$(hostname).before_migration/lsmap-all.txt
    /usr/ios/cli/ioscli lsmap -all -fmt : > /home/padmin/$(hostname).before_migration/lsmap-alldelimited.
    txt
    ...

    It's inserting extraneous greater than signs

    # {
    mkdir /home/padmin/$(hostname).be> fore_migration
    /usr/ios/cli/ioscli> lstcpip -stored > /home/padmin/$(hostname).before_migration/lstcpip.txt
    /usr/ios/cli/ioscli lsmap -al> l > /home/padmin/$(hostname).before_migration/lsmap-all.txt
    ...

    For example, look at the word "before" above.



    ------------------------------
    Robert Berendt IBMChampion
    Business Systems Analyst, Lead
    Dekko
    Fort Wayne
    ------------------------------


  • 2.  RE: Pasting inserting extraneous greater than signs

    Posted Mon March 09, 2026 12:13 PM

    Seems to work better if I open putty there directly instead of going through vtmenu from the HMC



    ------------------------------
    Robert Berendt IBMChampion
    Business Systems Analyst, Lead
    Dekko
    Fort Wayne
    ------------------------------



  • 3.  RE: Pasting inserting extraneous greater than signs

    Posted Mon March 09, 2026 12:33 PM

    Better, but still throwing in some extraneous greater than signs.

    Opened a case with IBM but the fellow there only reads every third word or less in the case and is telling me to paste it into the "root shell" prompt.  He's taking the greater than signs to mean that I'm pasting the contents into some special shell which begins with a greater than sign.



    ------------------------------
    Robert Berendt IBMChampion
    Business Systems Analyst, Lead
    Dekko
    Fort Wayne
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Pasting inserting extraneous greater than signs

    Posted Mon March 09, 2026 01:33 PM

    Technician suggested pasting one line at a time.

    This seemed to work.  I did find some lines were broken in the wrong place in the source document.  Perhaps due to margins, etc.  Not sure why the extra > were added but they didn't appear when this was piecemeal entered.



    ------------------------------
    Robert Berendt IBMChampion
    Business Systems Analyst, Lead
    Dekko
    Fort Wayne
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Pasting inserting extraneous greater than signs

    Posted Tue March 10, 2026 03:50 AM

    I do indeed recommend using putty (or any decent terminal emulator) to directly access the Virtual I/O server as soon as networking is up. Of course it is better to use vtmenu (from HMC) or mkvterm (from Novalink) or a Console (from PowerVC) if you need to change IP addresses or need to reboot the server and want to follow along.

    I can also recommend another terminal emulator I have been using for 13 years now, called IVT (Intelligent Virtual Terminal), I like to call it a "Putty on steroids" because of its versatility. When pasting large amounts of text, it paces it (slows it down a configurable tiny bit) so buffers don't overflow, it replaces weird "Word" like characters like the fancy quotes or long dashes into regular ones automatically - so commands don't choke on unexpected characters, it usually handles line-breaks and different column widths very well. It is not free, but the price is low and worth every penny in my opinion. See www.ivtssh.nl (no, I am not affiliated with them).



    ------------------------------
    Richard Westerik
    Principal specialist
    Simac IT NL bv
    Ede
    +31651575123
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Pasting inserting extraneous greater than signs

    Posted Mon March 09, 2026 01:20 PM
    the vtmenu console is only useable for initial setup. as soon as networking to VIOS is up and running, use ssh ��
    about the extra > this might be a putty setting at Terminal/Keyboard

    -h

    Best regards,
    Mit freundlichen Grüßen
    Holger Scherer

    IBM Champion since 2022
    CEAC - Common Europe Advisory Council
    Common Europe Hall of Fame





    Original Message


  • 7.  RE: Pasting inserting extraneous greater than signs

    Posted Mon March 09, 2026 01:34 PM

    The console always stays useable.  And can be quite useful, especially if you have to do stuff one might associate with a dedicated system.  Like 

    • Changing IP addresses
    • reboots
    • etc



    ------------------------------
    Robert Berendt IBMChampion
    Business Systems Analyst, Lead
    Dekko
    Fort Wayne
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 8.  RE: Pasting inserting extraneous greater than signs

    Posted Mon March 09, 2026 01:37 PM

    Top one is from vtmenu

    The bottom one is not

    If I had run the process from vtmenu I would know that the reboot is complete



    ------------------------------
    Robert Berendt IBMChampion
    Business Systems Analyst, Lead
    Dekko
    Fort Wayne
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 9.  RE: Pasting inserting extraneous greater than signs

    Posted Tue March 10, 2026 08:00 AM

    There can be some weird character mapping issues when using the AIX/VIOS console (vtmenu) & this can mess with copy+paste quite a bit.  It's not really a bug, more of a feature.  Unless there is a reason to perform a task on the console, you're much better off performing it over ssh where these character mapping issues aren't present.  Even something like a reboot, you can initiate from ssh and then observe occurring on the console.



    ------------------------------
    Phill Rowbottom
    Unix Consultant
    Service Express
    Bedford
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 10.  RE: Pasting inserting extraneous greater than signs

    Posted Tue March 10, 2026 12:12 PM

    Two things to look for:

    - Bracketed paste (may be an option on your terminal emulator, you can turn it off with printf "\e[?2004l" from the session.
    Ever messed up an unmessable password change by pasting a password that was generated on a password manager?  The system said everything was OK, but you could no longer login ?  Yup, bracketed paste.

    - Non-ASCII codes in your text. Windows may make a mess of ISO-8859-1 vs. cp1252. Text that has crossed the grubby finger of any web-based apps where non-ambiguous ASCII characters get silently re-writen to some UTF homoglyph (there are about 5 homglyphs for '>', and the amount of something-somethin-dash is mind-boggling).


    But do start with the bracketed paste.  And dump the text you're pasting into a text file and do an hexdump.



    ------------------------------
    José Pina Coelho
    IT Specialist at Kyndryl
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


  • 11.  RE: Pasting inserting extraneous greater than signs

    Posted Tue March 10, 2026 12:26 PM

    ssh into the HMC, then mkvterm/vtmenu.   Way less problems than any of the multiple "console via browser" incarnations we've had.



    ------------------------------
    José Pina Coelho
    IT Specialist at Kyndryl
    ------------------------------

    Original Message


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