The Unix dd Command

 
I was asked the following question
via email

What if a file that is an ASCII
character file (CRLF) needs to be
sent to an IBM server that understands
only EBCDIC? How will the CRLF conversion
from ASCII to EBCDIC take place between
Windows and IBM servers? In other words,
what is the command used to convert ASCII
to EBCDIC format?

Under the Unix operating system, the command
that has historically been used to convert
between ASCII and EBCDIC is the dd command:

Here's a Wikipedia article on dd:

dd (Unix)

Of course, the question was for the Windows
Operating System, not the Unix Operating System

I don't know whether or not there is a decent
version of dd for Windows available. It's
such an obvious idea. Maybe there is a dd
for Windows and maybe it is complete enough
to fully implement ASCII and EBCDIC conversions.
I've not looked into this.

Here's another approach: There's is a module under
Perl that does ASCII and EBCDIC conversions.
It is found here:

Convert-EBCDIC

Again, this is not something I've actually tried.
At bare minimum, you would have to install Perl
on your Windows computer to get this to work.

Ed Abbott