z/OS V1R9.0 UNIX System Services Command ... - Christian Grothoff

Appendix L. Automatic Codeset Conversion: Default Status
for Specific Commands
Most commands that perform file I/O allow automatic codeset conversion of files
tagged as text with a codeset. For example, a file with ISO8859-1 (ASCII) content
that is tagged with TXT, ISO8859-1, may be converted to IBM-1047 (EBCDIC) for
processing by UNIX shells and utilities. Automatic conversion is controlled by
configuration parameters and environment variables. For more information about
automatic conversion, see z/OS UNIX System Services Planning.
Table 44 lists commands which allows automatic codeset conversion by default, but
use the –B option to disable it:
Table 44. Commands that Allow Automatic Conversion by Default
cmp
file
head
tail
strings
pack
Table 45 lists commands that expect binary data, so they prevent automatic
conversion:
Table 45. Commands that Disallow Automatic Conversion by Default
Command Special Behavior
cksum Will allow automatic conversion with –T.
compress v Allow conversion on the file being read.
v Disable conversion on the compressed
file and allow the automatic tagging of
the file as binary.
Note: Because file tag information can’t be
preserved in the compressed file, you can
lose data if translation does not occur on
input. If you really do want translation to
occur, change the file tag, or disable
automatic conversion with the
_BPXK_AUTOCVT environment variable.
dd v Prevents automatic conversion.
v If you specify conv=ascii, conv=ebcdic,
or conv=ibm, and the input is tagged as
text, dd will issue a warning message if
the file tag does not match the expected
output.
gencat Prevents automatic conversion.
mkcatdefs Prevents automatic conversion.
od Will allow automatic conversion with –T.
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