Re: Gettext solution (Was: Re: gettext packages)

[Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>]

>  elif [ -n "$BASH" ]; then
>   echo $"$*"
> 
> I've tried it. I can't get the $"..." syntax to do anything though, YMMV :}
> It works fine if I run it with ash too.

Bash first performs the locale translation $"<string>" and replaces it
by "<translated string>".  Only then does it perform variable
expansion etc.  The following works, however:
  eval "echo \$\"$*\""

Nicer might be the following, but this is untested:

TEXTDOMAIN=foo
export TEXTDOMAIN

if command -v gettext >/dev/null 2>&1; then echo="gettext -s"
elif [ -n "$BASH" ]; then xecho(){ eval "echo \$\"$*\""; } ; echo=xecho
else echo=echo
fi

and then use $echo instead of echo throughout the script.

But of course, if the script is #!/bin/bash, $"..." can be used in the
first place.  And if it's /bin/sh, then I don't know whether it's
necessarily so useful to test for sh=bash.

When I have finished a couple of other projects (primarily a more
secure version of the mktex* scripts), I intend to help the upstream
author split out the gettext program from the rest of the suite.

   Julian

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
        Debian GNU/Linux Developer,  see http://www.debian.org/~jdg