Presenting the CHGATR Command

October 20, 2004 Hey, Ted

I had a similar problem to Jim’s in “Wanted: Qshell Output in ASCII.” Qshell was building EBCDIC files, but he wanted them in ASCII. In my case, a “Wintel” machine’s FTP client was putting ASCII files in the Integrated File System, but I preferred EBCDIC files. I found a CL command that solved my problem.

I used the Change Attributes (CHGATR) command. This command, which was introduced in V5R1, can change the CCSID of a file. I used commands like the following to change files from CCSID 819 (the CCSID they were assigned when they were created during an FTP session) to 37 (US English):

CHGATR OBJ('/mydir/myfile.txt') ATR(*CCSID) VALUE(37)

I need to point out that CHGATR does not convert the data in the file to the new CCSID. In my case, I sent a second put command and everything was fine. Here is a portion of an illustrative script:

lcd /temp
cd /mydir
put empty.txt mynewfile.txt
quote rcmd CHGATR OBJ('mynewfile.txt') ATR(*CCSID) VALUE(37)
put myrealpcfile.txt mynewfile.txt

The empty.txt file is not really empty. I had keyed one x into it. Copying it to the IFS created a file with a code page of 819. Then I used the rcmd server command to change the CCSID. Last, I copied the real data to the IFS.

The other ways to change a file’s CCSID that were presented in “Wanted: Qshell Output in ASCII” and “More Qshell Output in ASCII” are fine, but I wanted to mention this CL command.

–Ken

Thanks for bringing CHGATR to our command. As you point out, it is a relatively new command.

You can use CHGATR against a single file or a group of files whose names match a pattern. If you specify SUBTREE(*YES), the system will also change objects in subdirectories.

In addition to changing a file’s CCSID, CHGATR can change the following properties.

Be aware that not all options are available in every file system.

To learn more about CHGATR, go to the IBM iSeries Infocenter.

–Ted