So ascii will print an ascii character table to stdout. Is there a way to print the same thing, but for the EBCDIC character encoding?

New to shell scripting, I have few commands like this. Is it optimal to have such temporary files or should I try to combine all these commands ? if it is latter, can you help me to redirect output from dd command to tr command and then to iconv. Thanks. dd if=abcd.dat cbs=38 conv=block of=abcd.temp cat abcd.temp | tr -d "\n" | tr -d "\r" > abcd.output iconv -f ASCII -t EBCDIC-US abcd.ebcdic

I need to directly manipulate files from a mainframe. Text would be encoded in EBCDIC. Data can contain binary and packed decimal fields. I know I can deal with the data. I am trying to avoid the conversion(s). (and the trouble with converting each field based on it being text or binary). I am familiar with mainframe, USS and CentOS systems. What I would like to do is flip CentOS to be pure EBCDIC. A search on the internet and StackExchange has revealed very little. I saw an article where Sammyrulez had "... succesfuly added EBCDIC support to a CentOS box by adding lang and encoding to /etc/i18n/sysconfig." It seems like there should be more to it than this. I plan to use COBOL via GCC or whatever product works best. (one hurdle at a time) Has anyone been through this already?