french-conjugator reads the infinitive form of French verbs from its standard input and writes (to standard output) the complete conjugation of those verbs, if they are known.
Each mode and tense is introduced by a line that starts with a hyphen and a space, and ends with a colon. The conjugation is ended with a line that only contains a hyphen. If the given verb is unknown or not in the infinitive form, only such a line is written.
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.
In the past participle tense, four lines are written: they correspond in order to the masculine singular, masculine plural, feminine singular and feminine plural.