File FTP to Unix from Mainframes.

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

Hi I have got one file FTPd from mainframe in an ASCII format in Unix environment.

If I have to deduce record width within this file, each approach we are finding different record width.

head -1 filename | wc -m
awk '{print length($0)}' filename ... lists record width for all records.
sed -n '1np' filename | wc -m

Each of these 3 approaches I get different count. It is very much clear file which got transferred from Mainframes is not correctly got FTPd.

Has anyone faced this problem before, & can help me?

Thanks in advance.

2

Just a thought, when the data comes over from a mainframe, won't it be in EBCDIC encoding? You will probably have to convert this to ASCII before you can do anything with it.

3

If you do a search of all forums for "ftp mainframe" you should find several threads about transferring fixed record length files.

4

My team is receiving file from mainframes, for which we are not writing FTP command in a JCL.
My question is how come 3 different commands which help in estimating no of chars in record give different output?
Since any normal ASCII file, the command I mentioned produces the same counts.

The file which we receive is in ASCII, because when I cat it, I can see the ASCII business contents in it.

5

You don't provide much info, but I will make a guess based the little info I have. Those files are not organized as a collection of lines of ascii characters. A line will have a max length and it must be terminated by a newline character. Files like this are the only files those commands are designed to work with. So each command is screwing up in a slightly different manner.

6

Yes you are right Perderabo, the file which we received from mainframes had these weird '^@' chars, which is not detectible by simple cat command. It could be only seen by cat -v.