Globalization on z/OS systems

Setting up your system or user environment for globalization on z/OS® systems is a little different from what most users are accustomed to when setting up globalization on ASCII platforms. An extra step is typically needed when changing your locale, which involves setting the ASCII/EBCDIC coded character set conversion for the controlling terminal. The conversion is required because most PC terminal emulators require ASCII data, but the z/OS shells use EBCDIC data.

For example, when using a PC emulator to interactively log into an ASCII UNIX operating system, a user will:

On the PC, change the emulator's coded character set to match the coded character set of the remote session's locale.
In the UNIX shell, assign the environment variable LC_ALL to a new locale, where the ASCII coded character set of that locale matches the emulator's setting.

When interactively logging into an EBCDIC z/OS UNIX operating system, the user will:

On the PC, change the emulator's coded character set to match the ASCII coded character set of the remote session's locale. For example, the user might change the translation settings in their emulator to use coded character set ISO/IEC 8859-2 (Latin-2).
In the UNIX shell:
- Assign the environment variable LC_ALL to a new locale, whose EBCDIC coded character set is compatible with the ASCII coded character set used in the emulator. To determine if a coded character set is compatible with a particular locale, refer to the information about locales that are supplied with z/OS XL C/C++ in z/OS XL C/C++ Programming Guide .
  For example, a user might issue:
```
 export LC_ALL=Hu_HU.IBM-1165
```
- If a tty is allocated, issue the chcp command to assign the EBCDIC and ASCII coded character sets, as appropriate. Note that the specified ASCII coded character set should match that of the client emulator's setting.
  For example, a user might issue:
```
 chcp -a ISO8859-2 -e IBM-1165
```

On z/OS systems, in daemons such as rlogind, telnetd, and sshd, conversion between ASCII and EBCDIC occurs in the forked daemon process which handles the user's connection. This process allocates the terminal (tty) for the end user. On ASCII platforms, no conversion is necessary.