I don't find any AUTOCVT in any PARMLIB member.

Ah HAH: indeed, if I reset _BPXK_AUTOCVT to OFF and then issue sh and do the 
same thing, the file is NOT tagged. If I exit back to the original shell--where 
_BPXK_AUTOCVT is allegedly OFF--and repeat, it IS tagged.

Hmm. I updated my .profile to add:

_BPXK_AUTOCVT=OFF

I inserted this well before:
exec bash

...and that "fixes" it, but it breaks command completion etc. WTF.

I also have code in my .profile to set my prompt:
PROMPT_COMMAND='RC=$? ; if [ $RC = 0 ] ; then PS1="(`whoami`) Ready; `date 
+%H:%M:%S` $PWD > ";
 else PS1="(`whoami`) Ready($RC); `date +%H:%M:%S` $PWD > ";
 fi'
export PROMPT_COMMAND

This normally shows me a nice prompt like:
(PHS) Ready; 16:35:53 /u/vendor/phs >

But with AUTOCVT turned off, I get:
(▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒) Ready; ▒▒z▒▒z▒▒ /u/vendor/phs >

...which I don't understand at all.
I mean, I get that the : and the lowercase Z collide across ASCII/EBCDIC but 
why is AUTOCVT affecting that? I understand that it's running whoami and date 
each time, but when I run those from the command line they look OK.

I'm also now unable to get the old 2.4 system to cooperate and let me create 
j.txt without tagging, which I was sure I verified yesterday. That doesn't mean 
I think the universe is messing with me, it means that I screwed up yesterday 
and am owning up to it!

In any case, the user that the automated build is running under is NOT me, and 
that user's .profile is just:

PATH=$PATH:/u/vendor/gzip/bin; export PATH
PATH=$PATH:/u/vendor/local/python/bin:/usr/lpp/java/J6.0.1_64/bin
MANPATH=$MANPATH:/u/vendor/local/python/man; export MANPATH
PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/u/vendor/local/zlib/lib; export PYTHONPATH
PS1="$ "

I have asked the guy running the builds to add the chtag and TYPE E to the FTP 
process and we'll see if that fixes it. Still wish I understood this...

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Jon 
Perryman
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2025 4:52 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: USS file tagging question

On Wed, 20 Aug 2025 15:23:27 -0400, Phil Smith III <[email protected]> wrote:

>Filetag : T=off   codeset=0

This eliminates the filesystem and you can forget about it. 

>> touch j.bad
>> touch j.c
>> touch j.txt
>> echo banana > j2.txt
> 
>> chtag -p j*
>- untagged    T=off j.bad
>- untagged    T=off j.c
>- untagged    T=off j.txt
>t ISO8859-1   T=on  j2.txt

This tells us that it's autocvt instead of some other mechanism because only 
the file with data was tagged. 

t assume you already verified AUTOCVT(xxx) in your PARMLIB(BPXPRMxx) specified 
NO or was not specified (using default).

I believe you said that you tested _BPXK_AUTOCVT=NO but this only overrides 
BPXPRM so we don't expect it to change anything but it does verify your startup 
scripts do not set this incorrectly.

This only leaves the shell which must have been compiled with AUTOCVT. Try 
setting the runtime variable you mentioned before but I suspect you might need 
to start the shell after setting it. You could do this by setting the env 
variable and issuing the shell command you are using (e.g sh).

There is overhead associated with autocvt. You will need to contact IBM to find 
out if they have an easy method to turn this off for the shell. Maybe they have 
the same shell by another name without AUTOCVT. Think twice about renaming it 
because maintenance could cause havoc.

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