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The recode reference manual

9.1 EBCDIC code

This charset is the IBM's External Binary Coded Decimal for Interchange Coding. This is an eight bits code. The following three variants were implemented in recode independently of RFC 1345:

EBCDIC

In recode, the us..ebcdic conversion is identical to `dd conv=ebcdic' conversion, and recode ebcdic..us conversion is identical to `dd conv=ascii' conversion. This charset also represents the way Control Data Corporation relates EBCDIC to 8-bits ASCII.

EBCDIC-CCC

In recode, the us..ebcdic-ccc or ebcdic-ccc..us conversions represent the way Concurrent Computer Corporation (formerly Perkin Elmer) relates EBCDIC to 8-bits ASCII.

EBCDIC-IBM

In recode, the us..ebcdic-ibm conversion is almost identical to the GNU `dd conv=ibm' conversion. Given the exact `dd conv=ibm' conversion table, recode once said:

Codes 91 and 213 both recode to 173 Codes 93 and 229 both recode to 189 No character recodes to 74 No character recodes to 106

So I arbitrarily chose to recode 213 by 74 and 229 by 106. This makes the EBCDIC-IBM recoding reversible, but this is not necessarily the best correction. In any case, I think that GNU dd should be amended. dd and recode should ideally agree on the same correction. So, this table might change once again.

RFC 1345 brings into recode 15 other EBCDIC charsets, and 21 other charsets having EBCDIC in at least one of their alias names. You can get a list of all these by executing:

recode -l | grep -i ebcdic

Note that recode may convert a pure stream of EBCDIC characters, but it does not know how to handle binary data between records which is sometimes used to delimit them and build physical blocks. If end of lines are not marked, fixed record size may produce something readable, but VB or VBS blocking is likely to yield some garbage in the converted results.