Text or binary processing - NFS version 2 and 3 protocols

z/OS UNIX is a byte-oriented, hierarchical, EBCDIC file system. For the NFS version 2 and version 3 protocols, the z/OS NFS server provides ASCII to EBCDIC text translation. For these versions of NFS, if you are just using the mainframe as a repository for your workstation (ASCII) data, you should use the binary mode to speed processing. If you use text mode, data from your workstation is converted into EBCDIC when it is stored on the mainframe. Conversely, when the z/OS NFS server returns the data to your client system, it converts the data back into ASCII. The conversion can slow processing, but might be necessary if you are sharing data with other MVS users. All data is converted according to the active translation table. Therefore, if the data set contains a mixture of characters and binary data, binary data is converted as well. In text mode, then, be careful not to mix your text data (characters) with binary data.

In text mode, you can either use the OEMVS311 translation table or the replacement customized translation table to convert data between ASCII and EBCDIC. If you are using z/OS UNIX and text mode processing, specify the OEMVS311 translation table with the xlat processing attribute. The OEMVS311 table translates ASCII (ISO 8859-1) to and from EBCDIC (1047 - z/OS UNIX System Services). TCP/IP for MVS version 3.1 provides the OEMVS311 table. This table translates the UNIX line terminator (lf) to the z/OS UNIX line terminator (nl). See z/OS Communications Server: IP Configuration Referencefor more information about creating and customizing your own translation tables.

This is an example of specifying the OEMVS311 translation table during a mount:

$  mount 1stc3mvs:"/hfs/usr/man/C,text,xlat(oemvs311)" /mnt
$  export MANPATH=/mnt
$  man more

In this example:

Operand: Description
1stc3mvs: Specifies the name of the z/OS host.
/hfs: Specifies the HFS prefix.
/urs/man/C: Specifies the HFS directory to be mounted.
text: Specifies that data be converted between ASCII and EBCDIC
xlat(oemvs311): Specifies that the translation table named OEMVS311 is used to convert data between ASCII and EBCDIC.
/mnt: Specifies the local mount point.
man more: Obtains a Man Page description of the more command