Commands that prevent automatic conversion by default

Table 1 lists commands that expect binary data, so they prevent automatic conversion.

Table 1. Commands that disallow automatic conversion by default
Command	Special behavior
cksum	Allows automatic conversion with –T.
compress	Allows automatic conversion on the file being read. Disables automatic conversion on the compressed file and allow the automatic tagging of the file as binary. Because file tag information cannot be preserved in the compressed file, you can lose data if translation does not occur on input. If you want translation to occur, change the file tag, or disable automatic conversion with the _BPXK_AUTOCVT environment variable.
dd	Prevents automatic conversion. If you specify conv=ascii, conv=ebcdic, or conv=ibm, and the input is tagged as text, dd issues a warning message if the file tag does not match the expected output.
gencat	Prevents automatic conversion.
mkcatdefs	Prevents automatic conversion.
od	Allows automatic conversion with –T.
sum	Allows automatic conversion with –T.
uncompress and zcat	Disables conversion on the compressed file being read. Allows conversion on the uncompressed file being written. Because the compressed file must always be binary, IBM® recommends that you do not provide the option to allow translation of a compressed file on input. However, if you need to do this, you must perform it manually using iconv
unpack and pcat	Prevents automatic conversion.
uudecode	Prevents automatic conversion.
uuencode	Prevents automatic conversion