10.4.1 Extracting Marked Strings

Once your awk program is working, and all the strings have been marked and you’ve set (and perhaps bound) the text domain, it is time to produce translations. First, use the ‘--gen-pot’ command-line option to create the initial ‘.pot’ file:

$ gawk --gen-pot -f guide.awk > guide.pot

When run with ‘--gen-pot’, gawk does not execute your program. Instead, it parses it as usual and prints all marked strings to standard output in the format of a GNU gettext Portable Object file. Also included in the output are any constant strings that appear as the first argument to dcgettext() or as the first and second argument to dcngettext().(55) See section A Simple Internationalization Example, for the full list of steps to go through to create and test translations for guide.