Modifying ASCII files for z/OS


  • If you are running z/OS release 1.10 or higher, you can edit ASCII files using option 3.17 and the EA prefix command (EDIT ASCII).
  • Convert the file from ASCII to EBCDIC before editing and back again when done.

    iconv -f ISO8859-1 -t IBM-1047 myfile.properties > myfile.properties.avi myfile.properties.a (or oedit if under a 3270 OMVS shell)
    iconv -f IBM-1047 -t ISO8859-1 myfile.properties.a > myfile.properties
  • Tag the file as ASCII text and then enable automatic conversion. Be careful not to set _BPXK_AUTOCVT=ON in your actual JVM process because Java does not expect automatic conversion of properties and XML files. For more information, see z/OS documentation under enhanced ASCII Functionality.

    chtag -tc ISO8859-1 myfile.properties (a file only needs to be tagged once.)
    export _BPXK_AUTOCVT=ON (this environment variable enables automatic conversion) vi myfile.properties
  • Edit the file using an SSH/SFTP client such as WinSCP.

 

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