There are both APL and non-APL character conversion tables. The IBM-supplied default is a null conversion table, but the systems programmer can select a different default for the OMVS command to use. If you do not want to use the default table, you can specify a table name with the CONVERT keyword. See the OMVS command description in z/OS UNIX System Services Command Reference for more details.

To access data in the z/OS UNIX file system, use a terminal that is operating in the same code page as the file system. In other words, if you have a 3270 terminal using a French code page, you cannot access z/OS UNIX file system data encoded in a German code page when you are using the OMVS-provided character conversion tables. However, you could provide your own OMVS conversion tables to convert between the French and German code pages.