EBCDIC to ASCII excluding packed fields; help in installing fcopy

[Ernie De Guzman]

I searched the forum and I found one that directly relates to my problem but it was from Sept. of 2000. The resolution was to install tcl that will include fcopy and then use fcopy to convert EBCDIC to ASCII excluding packed fields. I downloaded different versions of tcl and they are with .depot extension. I did not find any instructions on how to install them so I assumed I will use swinstall. I was able to install the different versions but I still could not find fcopy. My machine is a HP9000 running HPUX 11.0. Hope somebody out there can help me. Thanks.

[Rory R Hammond]

Not sure if I can help but. I get files from our VM system that are ebcdic. I convert them using dd


dd if=vmfile.txt of=ascii.txt file conv=ascii

In a previous life I have used
dd if=vmfile.txt of=ascii.txt conf=ibm

man on dd will help.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Dd won't work because it's all or nothing. When you convert any string data to ASCII, you will instantly clobber any binary/packed data at the same time.

I don't know nothing about no fcopy but I did make one forum customer happy with a Perl solution. There is also a reference to a commercial utility called "FilePort" but Perl's Convert::EBCDIC makes this rather easy.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/parseCurl.do?CURL=%2Fcm%2FQuestionAnswer%2F1%2C%2C0xefcfd7d96cbad711900a0090279cd0f9%2C00.html&admit=716493758+1066770268199+28353475

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Uh-oh Debbie:

It looks like when the Forums were migrated to the new Oracle/HP-UX environment my square brackets were mangled. I copied it back down and fixed the strange characters. I'll attach the Perl example script; that will also have the desired effect of preserving formatting so that the code is more readable.

[Ernie De Guzman]

Thanks guys. Clay, I will try your solution and thanks for the perl code as I don't really have a knowledge of it. I know I installed Perl 5 last year but don't have the programming side of it. I will give you guys some feedback after I tried the solution.

[Bill Hassell]

fcopy is likely the HP 3000 (MPE operating system) program that understands dozens of filetypes and can perform smart data conversion. I've not seen fcopy ported to any Unix system as it would involve a significant rewrite. The world of Unix is easy...no filetypes except specials like fifo, device, directory, etc. Otherwise, the file is defined by the program that created it...all files are simply a series of characters.

The mainframe and commercial opsystem world (like MPE) are very different. There are fixed record and blocking factors like 80x10, EBCDIC, packed decimal, ASCII header formats, and the list gets really long. Generally, few mainframe file formats are portable even among other mainframes.

So you'll need an exact definition for all the records on the media (tape, LAN, ftp, etc) including headers and trailers, then write a program that can read the raw data, break up the fields and exclude the ones you don't want and output the result in a format useful on HP-UX.