Garbage on the screen

Since the z/OS CIM server and all of its command-line utilities operate in the enhanced ASCII environment, all output is written using ASCII encoding. This can lead to garbage being displayed when watching the output from the CIM server command-line utilities, sample programs or from the CIM server itself. By default, the configuration files cimserver.env and profile.add shipped with the CIM server provide the required settings for automatic conversion to the correct encoding. For details on how to enable the automatic conversion and about Enhanced ASCII in general, refer to Using Enhanced ASCII functionality in z/OS UNIX System Services Planning.

One important issue is that automatic conversion so far only occurs for UNIX System Service applications. When the output of the CIM server or any of its clients should be consumed or displayed by applications other than UNIX System Services applications, the conversion must take place when the data are created. To achieve this, the output files need to be tagged as EBCDIC so that, for example, the CIM server’s output is converted to EBCDIC before it is consumed by these applications.