.. -*- mode: rst; encoding: utf-8 -*-

======================
Command-Line Interface
======================

Babel includes a command-line interface for working with message catalogs,
similar to the various GNU ``gettext`` tools commonly available on Linux/Unix
systems.


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When properly installed, Babel provides a script called ``babel``::

    $ babel --help
    usage: babel subcommand [options] [args]

    options:
      --version             show program's version number and exit
      -h, --help            show this help message and exit

The ``babel`` script provides a number of sub-commands that do the actual work.
Those sub-commands are described below.


extract
=======

The ``extract`` sub-command can be used to extract localizable messages from
a collection of source files::

    $ babel extract --help
    usage: babel extract [options] dir1 <dir2> ...

    options:
      -h, --help            show this help message and exit
      --charset=CHARSET     charset to use in the output
      -k KEYWORDS, --keyword=KEYWORDS
                            keywords to look for in addition to the defaults. You
                            can specify multiple -k flags on the command line.
      --no-default-keywords
                            do not include the default keywords
      -F MAPPING_FILE, --mapping=MAPPING_FILE
                            path to the extraction mapping file
      --no-location         do not include location comments with filename and
                            line number
      --omit-header         do not include msgid "" entry in header
      -o OUTPUT, --output=OUTPUT
                            path to the output POT file
      -w WIDTH, --width=WIDTH
                            set output line width (default 76)
      --no-wrap             do not break long message lines, longer than the
                            output line width, into several lines