The escape character (ESCAPE)

If you do not use a Control function key to escape a character, you can type a two-character escape sequence instead. (For an explanation of escape characters, see Typing escape sequences in the shell.)

To change the default escape character, or have more than one escape character, type escape characters after the ESCAPE keyword. You can type up to eight characters, enclosed in single quotation marks with no space between them. For example:

OMVS ESCAPE('`¢')

When specifying escape characters:

Select characters that are not in the POSIX portable character set. See The POSIX portable character set to see the contents of the POSIX portable character set.
Select single-byte characters, even if you are using a double-byte character set.

The escape characters specified with the OMVS command completely override those in the character conversion table being used. However, if no escape characters are specified with the OMVS command, the system uses those in the conversion table.