7.10 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.

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.