Question

for file in `find . -name "*.po"` ; do msgfmt -o `echo $file | sed s/\.po/\.mo/` $file ; done

This code I found is creating multiple MO files in all subdirectories from PO files. At first time, it works well. But when I run it second time;

it shows some syntax error messages. I checked the PO files that the msgfmt is complaining but they were not existing before. They are created after running this code.

For example the file was secpolicy.po but it also created another secpolicy.po file.

What is wrong in that code?

Answer 1

The problem is most likely with the quoting. Since you don’t quote the sed pattern, the shell interprets the backslashes and calls sed as

sed s/.po/.mo/

When you have a file named secpolicy.po, it will change it to se.molicy.po, which results in a call to

msgfmt -o se.molicy.po secpolicy.po

To fix this, change the sed to

echo $file | sed 's/\.po$/.mo/'

See the additional single quotes ' and the end of string $.

If you have a file abc.po, it will match the dot \., the string po and finally the end of line $, and then replace this match with .mo, resulting in abc.mo