10.1.7 Desktop Entry mode operations

‘--template=template’

Specify a .desktop file used as a template.

‘-k[keywordspec]’

‘--keyword[=keywordspec]’

Specify keywordspec as an additional keyword to be looked for. Without a keywordspec, the option means to not use default keywords.

‘-l locale’

‘--locale=locale’

Specify the locale name, either a language specification of the form ll or a combined language and country specification of the form ll_CC.

‘-d directory’

Specify the base directory of ‘.msg’ message catalogs.

To generate a ‘.desktop’ file for a single locale, you can use it as follows.

msgfmt --desktop --template=template --locale=locale \
  -o file filename.po …

On the other hand, when using msgfmt from a Makefile, it is cumbersome to loop over all locales under a particular directory. msgfmt provides a special operation mode for this use-case. To generate a ‘.desktop’ file from multiple ‘.po’ files under a directory, specify the directory with the ‘-d’ option.

msgfmt --desktop --template=template -d directory -o file

msgfmt first reads the ‘LINGUAS’ file under directory, and then processes all ‘.po’ files listed there. You can also limit the locales to a subset, through the ‘LINGUAS’ environment variable.

For either operation modes, the ‘-o’ and ‘--template’ options are mandatory.

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