gettxt(1)

gettxt -- retrieve a text string from a message database

Synopsis

gettxt msgfile:msgnum [dflt_msg]

Description

gettxt retrieves a text string from a message file in the directory /usr/lib/locale/locale/LC_MESSAGES. The directory name locale corresponds to the language in which the text strings are written; see setlocale(3C) and environ(5).

msgfile: Name of the file from which to retrieve msgnum. The name can be up to 14 characters in length, but may not contain either \0 (NULL) or the characters / (slash) or : (colon).
msgnum: Sequence number of the string to retrieve from msgfile. The strings in msgfile are numbered sequentially from 1 to n, where n is the number of strings in the file.
dflt_msg: Default string to be displayed if gettxt fails to retrieve msgnum from msgfile. Nongraphic characters must be represented as alphabetic escape sequences.

The text string to be retrieved is in the file msgfile, created by the mkmsgs(1) utility and installed under the directory /usr/lib/locale/locale/LC_MESSAGES. The directory searched is specified by the environment variable LC_MESSAGES. If LC_MESSAGES is not set, the environment variable LANG will be used. If LANG is not set, the files containing the strings are under the directory /usr/lib/locale/C/LC_MESSAGES.

If gettxt fails to retrieve a message in the requested language, it will try to retrieve the same message from /usr/lib/locale/C/LC_MESSAGES/msgfile. If this also fails, and if dflt_msg is present and non-empty, then it will display the value of dflt_msg; if dflt_msg is not present or is empty, then it will display the string Message not found!!\n. If the environment variables LANG or LC_MESSAGES have not been set to other than their default values,

gettxt UX:10 "hello world\n"

will try to retrieve the 10th message from /usr/lib/locale/C/LC_MESSAGES/UX. If the retrieval fails, the message hello world, followed by a newline, will be displayed.

Files

/usr/lib/locale/C/LC_MESSAGES/: default message files created by mkmsgs(1)
/usr/lib/locale/locale/LC_MESSAGES/: language-specific message files created by mkmsgs(1)
/usr/lib/locale/locale/LC_MESSAGES/uxcore.abi: language-specific message file for gettxt

References

exstr(1), gettxt(3C), mkmsgs(1), setlocale(3C), srchtxt(1)