Recursive xgettext?

Question

How can I compile a .po file using xgettext with PHP files with a single command recursively?

My PHP files exist in a hierarchy, and the straight xget

Answer 1

You cannot achieve this with one single command. The xgettext option --files-from is your friend.

find . -name '*.php' >POTFILES
xgettext --files-from=POTFILES

If you are positive that you do not have too many source files you can also use find with xargs:

find . -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 xgettext

However, if you have too many source files, xargs will invoke xgettext multiple times so that the maximum command-line length of your platform is not exceeded. In order to protect yourself against that case you have to use the xgettext option -j, --join-existing, remove the stale messages file first, and start with an empty one so that xgettext does not bail out:

rm -f messages.po
echo >messages.po
find . -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 xgettext --join-existing

Compare that with the simple solution given first with the list of source files in POTFILES!

Using find with --exec is very inefficient because it will invoke xgettext -j once for every source file to search for translatable strings. In the particular case of xgettext -j it is even more inefficient because xgettext has to read the evergrowing existing output file messages.po with every invocation (that is with every input source file).