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The recode reference manual

9.2 IBM's PC code

This charset is available in recode under the name IBM-PC, with dos, MSDOS and pc as acceptable aliases. The shortest way of specifying it in recode is pc.

The charset is aimed towards a PC microcomputer from IBM or any compatible. This is an eight-bit code. This charset is fairly old in recode, its tables were produced a long while ago by mere inspection of a printed chart of the IBM-PC codes and glyph.

It has CR-LF as its implied surface. This means that, if the original end of lines have to be preserved while going out of IBM-PC, they should currently be added back through the usage of a surface on the other charset, or better, just never removed. Here are examples for both cases:

recode pc..l2/cl < input > output recode pc/..l2 < input > output

RFC 1345 brings into recode 44 `IBM' charsets or code pages, and also 8 other code pages. You can get a list of these all these by executing:(11)

recode -l | egrep -i '(CP|IBM)[0-9]'

All charset or aliases beginning with letters `CP' or `IBM' also have CR-LF as their implied surface. The same is true for a purely numeric alias in the same family. For example, all of 819, CP819 and IBM819 imply CR-LF as a surface. Note that ISO-8859-1 does not imply a surface, despite it shares the same tabular data as 819.

There are a few discrepancies between this IBM-PC charset and the very similar RFC 1345 charset ibm437, which have not been analysed yet, so the charsets are being kept separate for now. This might change in the future, and the IBM-PC charset might disappear. Wizards would be interested in comparing the output of these two commands:

recode -vh IBM-PC..Latin-1 recode -vh IBM437..Latin-1

The first command uses the charset prior to RFC 1345 introduction. Both methods give different recodings. These differences are annoying, the fuzziness will have to be explained and settle down one day.