Hello, coreutils-8.17 contains this message: #: src/fmt.c:285 #, c-format msgid "" " -t, --tagged-paragraph indentation of first line different from second\n" " -u, --uniform-spacing one space between words, two after sentences\n" " -w, --width=WIDTH maximum line width (default of 75 columns)\n" " -g, --goal=WIDTH goal width (default of 93% of width)\n" The message is detected by xgettext as C formatted string because of the percentage character. The problem is such string does not pass through msgfmt tool while compiling the catalog because the '% ' is not a valid printf sequence. Solution is to suppress the auto-detection by adding /*xgettext:no-c-format*/ before the fputs() line in the source code. -- Petr