9.10 Invoking the msgexec Program

msgexec [option] command [command-option]

The msgexec program applies a command to all translations of a translation catalog. The command can be any program that reads a translation from standard input. It is invoked once for each translation. Its output becomes msgexec’s output. msgexec’s return code is the maximum return code across all invocations.

A special builtin command called ‘0’ outputs the translation, followed by a null byte. The output of ‘msgexec 0’ is suitable as input for ‘xargs -0’.

During each command invocation, the environment variable MSGEXEC_MSGID is bound to the message’s msgid, and the environment variable MSGEXEC_LOCATION is bound to the location in the PO file of the message. If the message has a context, the environment variable MSGEXEC_MSGCTXT is bound to the message’s msgctxt, otherwise it is unbound. If the message has a plural form, environment variable MSGEXEC_MSGID_PLURAL is bound to the message’s msgid_plural and MSGEXEC_PLURAL_FORM is bound to the order number of the plural actually processed (starting with 0), otherwise both are unbound. If the message has a previous msgid (added by msgmerge), environment variable MSGEXEC_PREV_MSGCTXT is bound to the message’s previous msgctxt, MSGEXEC_PREV_MSGID is bound to the previous msgid, and MSGEXEC_PREV_MSGID_PLURAL is bound to the previous msgid_plural.

Note: It is your responsibility to ensure that the command can cope with input encoded in the translation catalog’s encoding. If the command wants input in a particular encoding, you can in a first step convert the translation catalog to that encoding using the ‘msgconv’ program, before invoking ‘msgexec’. If the command wants input in the locale’s encoding, but you want to avoid the locale’s encoding, then you can first convert the translation catalog to UTF-8 using the ‘msgconv’ program and then make ‘msgexec’ work in an UTF-8 locale, by using the LC_ALL environment variable.

This document was generated on June 7, 2014 using texi2html 5.0.