genmsg Utility

The new genmsg utility can be used with the catgets() family of functions to create internationalized source message catalogs. The utility examines a source program file for calls to functions in catgets and builds a source message catalog from the information it finds. For example:

% cat example.c
	...
	/* NOTE: %s is a file name */
	printf(catgets(catd, 5, 1, "%s cannot be opened."));
	/* NOTE: "Read" is a past participle, not a present
 
			tense verb */
	printf(catgets(catd, 5, 1, "Read"));
	...
% genmsg -c NOTE example.c
The following file(s) have been created.
			new msg file = "example.c.msg"
% cat example.c.msg
$quote "
$set 5
1			"%s cannot be opened"
	/* NOTE: %s is a file name */
2			"Read"
	/* NOTE: "Read" is a past participle, not a present
			tense verb */

In the above example, genmsg is run on the source file example.c, which produces a source message catalog named example.c.msg. The -c option with the argument NOTE causes genmsg to include comments in the catalog. If a comment in the source program contains the string specified, the comment appears in the message catalog after the next string extracted from a call to catgets.

You can use genmsg to number the messages in a message set automatically.

For more information, see the genmsg(1) man page.

To generate a formatted message catalog file, use the gencat(1) utility.

For information on the message extraction utility for Portable Message files (.po files) and also on how to generate message object files (.mo files) from the .po files, see the xgettext(1), and msgfmt(1) man pages, respectively.