I usually use the CLI over SSH to work with my Mikrotiks, because we are primarily a Macintosh shop, so we use Winbox and the like only when absolutely necessary.
Yesterday I was in a situation where I could only talk to a router in Winbox’s MAC connection mode. I brought up a terminal window inside Winbox to paste in (^V) a command line copied from an online file. Whenever I did this, my terminal session entered a mode where it anticipated the command it thought I was typing, automatically finished it as if I had typed a tab, then of course received the remainder of the command from the paste, and got all upset about the syntax. At that point, the command prompt line, which usually ends with a single “>”, changed to a double “>>”, and the terminal session was stuck in this “automatic completion” mode for the remainder of the session, even for things I typed by hand. I tried a number of things to get back to normal mode, but failed – the only way I could find to get out was to close the terminal window and start another one.
After a LONG time looking through the wiki, it looks like I probably entered something called “hotlock mode,” which isn’t described anywhere. I’m mildly curious about what it’s for, but my major question is, how do I avoid triggering it every time I want to paste things into a terminal window? Also how do I turn it off without re-pasting the same text over again?
(It also explains why I have never seen this behavior before, because “paste” is not ^V on the Macintosh.)