spell(1) spell(1)NAME spell, hashmake, spellin, hashcheck - find spelling errors SYNOPSIS spell [-v] [-b] [-x] [-l] [+local-file] [file...] /usr/lib/spell/hashmake /usr/lib/spell/spellin n /usr/lib/spell/hashcheck spelling-list DESCRIPTION spell collects words from each named file and locates them in a spelling list. Words that neither occur among nor are derivable (by applying certain inflections, prefixes, or suffixes) from words in the spelling list are printed on the standard output. If no file is named, words are collected from the standard input. spell ignores most troff(1), tbl(1), and eqn(1) construc- tions. Under the -v flag option, all words not literally in the spelling list are printed, and plausible derivations from the words in the spelling list are indicated. Under the -b flag option, British spelling is checked. In addition to preferring centre, colour, programme, speciali- ty, travelled, and so on, this flag option insists upon -ise in words like standardise Under the -x flag option, every plausible stem is printed with = for each word. By default, spell, like deroff(1), follows chains of includ- ed files (.so and .nx troff(1) requests), unless the names of such included files begin with /usr/lib. Under the -l flag option, spell follows the chains of all included files. Under the +local-file flag option, words found in local-file are removed from the output of spell. The placeholder local-file is the name of a user-provided file that contains a sorted list of words, one per line. With this option, the user can specify a set of words that are correct spellings (in addition to the spelling list included in spell) for each job. The spelling list is based on many sources, and while more haphazard than an ordinary dictionary, it is also more ef- fective with respect to proper names and popular technical words. Coverage of the specialized vocabularies of biology, April, 1990 1
spell(1) spell(1)medicine, and chemistry is light. Pertinent auxiliary files may be specified by name argu- ments, indicated below with their default settings and list- ed in the section ``FILES.'' Copies of all output are accu- mulated in the history file. The stop list filters out misspellings (for example, thier=thy-y+ier) that would oth- erwise pass. Three routines help maintain and check the hash lists used by spell: hashmake Read a list of words from the standard input and write the corresponding nine-digit hash code on the standard output. spellin n Read n hash codes from the standard input and write a compressed spelling list on the standard output. Information about the hash coding is printed on standard error. The compressed spel- ling list from the spellin output is in binary format and should be generally redirected into a file or a pipe. hashcheck Read a compressed spelling-list and recreate the nine-digit hash codes for all the words in it; it writes these codes on the standard output. EXAMPLES spell filea fileb filec > mistakes would put a list of the words from filea, fileb, and filec that were not part of the on-line dictionary into the file mistakes. The following example creates the hashed spelling list hlist and checks the result by comparing the two temporary files; they should be equal. cat wds | /usr/lib/spell/hashmake | sort -u >tmp1 cat tmp1 | /usr/lib/spell/spellin `cat tmp1 | wc -l` >hlist cat hlist | /usr/lib/spell/hashcheck >tmp2 diff tmp1 tmp2 FILES /bin/spell /usr/lib/spell /usr/lib/spell/spellin /usr/lib/spell/hashcheck /usr/lib/spell/hashmake D_SPELL=/usr/lib/spell/hlist[ab] 2 April, 1990
spell(1) spell(1)S_SPELL=/usr/lib/spell/hstop H_SPELL=/usr/lib/spell/spellhist /usr/lib/spell/spellprog /usr/lib/spell/compress SEE ALSO diction(1), deroff(1), eqn(1), sed(1), sort(1), style(1), tbl(1), tee(1), troff(1). BUGS The spelling list's coverage is uneven; new installations will probably wish to monitor the output for several months to gather local additions. Typically, these are kept in a separate local file that is added to the hashed spelling- list via spellin. The British spellings are incomplete. April, 1990 3