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Editing ASCII files under z/OS
XML and Java properties files are normally stored in the HFS (Unix) filesystem in codepage ISO8859-1
(ASCII). This document provides some assistance for how to edit these files on z/OS or OS/390. Here
are several approaches for editing ASCII files under Z/OS:
- If you running z/OS release 1.9 or later, 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. For
example:
iconv -f ISO8859-1 -t IBM-1047 myfile.properties > myfile.properties.a
vi myfile.properties.a (or oedit if under a 3270 OMVS shell)
iconv -f IBM-1047 -t ISO8859-1 myfile.properties.a > myfile.properties
The "atools" scripts which we have updated, available from the
downloads page, provides small shell
scripts that automate this process
- Tag the file as ASCII text and then enable automatic conversion.
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
Note: Be careful, however, to not set _BPXK_AUTOCVT=ON in your actual JVM
process, as Java will not expect automatic conversion of properties and XML files.
For more information, see
z/OS
enhanced ASCII Functionality
- Edit the file using an SSH/SFTP client such as WinSCP.
- Edit the file in an IDE, such as Eclipse, and then deploy it to z/OS using an Ant script
by using the Ant FTP task.
See the sample Eclipse projects on the downloads page for more information.