Recursive xgettext?

Got it:

find . -iname "*.php" | xargs xgettext

I was trying to use -exec before, but that would only run one file at a time. This runs them on the bunch.

Yay Google!

You cannot achieve this with one single command. The xgettext option --files-from is your friend.

find . -name '*.php' >POTFILES
xgettext --files-from=POTFILES

If you are positive that you do not have too many source files you can also use find with xargs:

find . -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 xgettext

However, if you have too many source files, xargs will invoke xgettext multiple times so that the maximum command-line length of your platform is not exceeded. In order to protect yourself against that case you have to use the xgettext option -j, --join-existing, remove the stale messages file first, and start with an empty one so that xgettext does not bail out:

rm -f messages.po
echo >messages.po
find . -name "*.php" -print0 | xargs -0 xgettext --join-existing

Compare that with the simple solution given first with the list of source files in POTFILES!

Using find with --exec is very inefficient because it will invoke xgettext -j once for every source file to search for translatable strings. In the particular case of xgettext -j it is even more inefficient because xgettext has to read the evergrowing existing output file messages.po with every invocation (that is with every input source file).

For WINDOWS command line a simpe solution is:

 @echo off
echo Generating file list..
dir html\wp-content\themes\wpt\*.php /L /B /S > %TEMP%\listfile.txt
echo Generating .POT file...
xgettext -k_e -k__ --from-code utf-8  -o html\wp-content\themes\wpt\lang\wpt.pot -L PHP --no-wrap -D html\wp-content\themes\wpt -f %TEMP%\listfile.txt
echo Done.
del %TEMP%\listfile.txt