GNU gettext find and replace

GNU gettext is used by many open source projects for translation support.

If you need to just do a find and replace in gettext source files, try this out to do a whole directory at once:

for i in *.po; do
  echo "Processing $i"
  msgfilter --no-wrap sed -e "s/OLD_TEXT/NEW_TEXT/g" < $i > /tmp/gettext
  mv /tmp/gettext $i
done

I couldn’t find a way to do the edit in place (a la sed -i), if you know of a way please let me know in the comments.