A built-in variable that, when set to a numeric value greater than 0, causes input lines to be converted from the various forms of EBCDIC to the standard ANSI code page. Since a file is always going to be either standard ANSI or one of the EBCDIC code pages, the EBCDIC built-in variable should be set in the BEGIN block to indicate that the script is expecting an EBCDIC file.

# sets the code page to US EBCDIC.

The table below indicates the EBCDIC code page tables that can be translated and the numeric values for each of them:

Supported EBCDIC Codes and Their Numeric Values