UNIX to Linux Porting: A Comprehensive Reference

F.5. Other Differences

F.5.1. ASCII and EBCDIC Issues

Traditionally, mainframe operating systems use the EBCDIC character set. Given that nonmainframe applications are mostly written in ASCII today, one could expect additional work when porting such programs. However, given that Linux is a pure ASCII environment, such problems are unlikely to arise when migrating applications to Linux on zSeries. Most Linux distributions provide a tool named recode to convert files between different character sets. The current version supports about 280 character sets, including 19 EBCDIC variants with national character support. If a program needs to do such conversions, use the iconv function declared in /usr/include/iconv.h.

F.5.2. The Format of cpuinfo

The structure of /proc/cpuinfo depends on the particular platform, so any application expecting a particular structure may need further analysis.