UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

By using dd command in Unix one can convert EBCDIC file into ASCII. It fails when it comes to having packed decimals within the EBCDIC file. The resultant of it has garbage chars.

How can we have EBCDIC file convertedinto ASCII, which has packed decimal data in it?

Thanks in advance.

Packed decimal is essentially a display field using a 4 bit byte.
The simplest solution is probably to write a cobol program to create a file without packed decimal (comp-3) prior to doing the conversion.
Also, the character sets are different, so that some characters will not convert at all.
The alternative is to write a program afterwards that does bit manipulation in order to convert a five byte field to a 9 decimal digit number.

So there is no straightforward option in command 'dd' or some other command available by which we can convert packed decimals into ASCII recognized decimals?
If yes, then we should handle this at COBOL side, as you mentioned is to explicitly handle to create a file without having packed decimals. Am I correct to understand to what you have said?

There is certainly no option to dd to handle a case like this. The program is that some parts of each record are ebcdic while other are not. A program or script must be written that knows which parts of the record need converting.