SYNOPSISecho aimé | french-deconjugator > result.txt
DESCRIPTIONfrench-deconjugator reads conjugated French verbs from the command line or from standard input and writes (to standard output) the verb's infinitive form, the mode (infinitive, indicative, conditional, subjunctive, imperative or participle), the tense (present, past, imperfect, future), the person (1, 2 or 3, while 0 is used for the present participle tense, and 4 and 5 are used in the past participle tense), and the number (singular or plural). These fields are separated by a comma and a space.
The standard input is not read if verbs are passed as command-line arguments.
By convention, persons 4 and 5 are used in the past participle tense to indicate the gender: 4 means masculine (e.g., "aimé" or "aimés") and 5 means feminine (e.g., "aimée" or "aimées").
A single conjugated form can correspond to more than one mode, tense and person. In this case, each alternative is written on its own line.
In all cases, the end of the answer is marked by an empty line. If the word is unknown, only this empty line is written. The names for the mode, tense and number are always in English. (This is meant to facilitate automatic parsing of the output. For a French user interface, see the GNOME application and applet.)
The command flushes its output buffer after finishing each answer. This allows the command to be easily called from another program through two pipes.
The command starts by loading its database from XML files (stored typically in /usr/share/verbiste). This takes some time, so it is a good idea to have the command answer many requests instead of running it for each request.
The verbiste library's source archive contains Perl and Java example programs that illustrate this technique.
This commands expects to read Latin-1 characters and writes Latin-1 characters. There must not be any leading or trailing white spaces on the lines read by the command.
- display a help page and exit
- display version information and exit
- select the language to use (fr for French or it for Italian); French is the default language
- print the infinitive form of all the verbs in the knowledge base, one per line, unsorted; other command-line arguments are ignored
EXAMPLES$ french-deconjugator aimé
aimer, participle, past, 0, singular
$ echo -ne 'a\nplu\nété\n' | french-deconjugator
avoir, indicative, present, 3, singular
plaire, participle, past, 0, singular
pleuvoir, participle, past, 0, singular
être, participle, past, 0, singular