If your system administrator enabled Enhanced ASCII or Unicode Services, you can able to tell z/OS UNIX which files are ASCII (code set ISO8859-1) files and which files are EBCDIC (code set IBM-1047) files. This enhanced functionality is useful when working with portable XPG 4.2 applications that are written in ASCII. You can port an application to z/OS UNIX, compile it in ASCII, and also tag text files as ASCII. z/OS UNIX performs conversion when an ASCII program reads or writes an EBCDIC tagged file or when an EBCDIC program reads or writes an ASCII tagged file.

For more information about enabling Enhanced ASCII or Unicode Services at the system level, see Using Enhanced ASCII functionality and Using Unicode Services in z/OS UNIX System Services Planning. For information about porting applications to z/OS UNIX, see z/OS® UNIX System Services Porting Guide.