ISPELL(1) UNIX System V (local) ISPELL(1)
NAME
ispell, buildhash, munchlist, findaffix, tryaffix, icombine,
ijoin - Interactive spelling checking
SYNOPSIS
ispell [common-flags] [-M|-N] [-Lcontext] [-V] files
ispell [common-flags] -l
ispell [common-flags] [-f file] [-s] {-a|-A}
ispell [-d file] [-w chars] -c
ispell [-d file] [-w chars] -e[e]
ispell [-d file] -D
ispell -v[v]
common-flags:
[-t] [-n] [-h] [-b] [-x] [-B] [-C] [-P] [-m] [-S] [-d
file] [-p file] [-w chars] [-W n] [-T type]
buildhash [-s] dict-file affix-file hash-file
buildhash-s count affix-file
munchlist [-l aff-file] [-c conv-file] [-T suffix]
[-s hash-file] [-D] [-v] [-w chars] [files]
findaffix [-p|-s] [-f] [-c] [-m min] [-M max] [-e elim]
[-t tabchar] [-l low] [files]
tryaffix [-p|-s] [-c] expanded-file affix[+addition]
icombine [-T type] [aff-file]
ijoin [-s|-u] join-options file1 file2
DESCRIPTION
Ispell is fashioned after the spell program from ITS (called
ispell on Twenex systems.) The most common usage is "ispell
filename". In this case, ispell will display each word
which does not appear in the dictionary at the top of the
screen and allow you to change it. If there are "near
misses" in the dictionary (words which differ by only a
single letter, a missing or extra letter, a pair of
transposed letters, or a missing space or hyphen), then they
are also displayed on following lines. As well as "near
misses", ispell may display other guesses at ways to make
the word from a known root, with each guess preceded by
question marks. Finally, the line containing the word and
the previous line are printed at the bottom of the screen.
If your terminal can display in reverse video, the word
itself is highlighted. You have the option of replacing the
word completely, or choosing one of the suggested words.
Commands are single characters as follows (case is ignored):
R Replace the misspelled word completely.
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Space
Accept the word this time only.
A Accept the word for the rest of this ispell
session.
I Accept the word, capitalized as it is in the file,
and update private dictionary.
U Accept the word, and add an uncapitalized
(actually, all lower-case) version to the private
dictionary.
0-n Replace with one of the suggested words.
L Look up words in system dictionary (controlled by
the WORDS compilation option).
X Write the rest of this file, ignoring
misspellings, and start next file.
Q Exit immediately and leave the file unchanged.
! Shell escape.
^L Redraw screen.
^Z Suspend ispell.
? Give help screen.
If the -M switch is specified, a one-line mini-menu at the
bottom of the screen will summarize these options.
Conversely, the -N switch may be used to suppress the mini-
menu. (The minimenu is displayed by default if ispell was
compiled with the MINIMENU option, but these two switches
will always override the default).
If the -L flag is given, the specified number is used as the
number of lines of context to be shown at the bottom of the
screen (The default is to calculate the amount of context as
a certain percentage of the screen size). The amount of
context is subject to a system-imposed limit.
If the -V flag is given, characters that are not in the 7-
bit ANSI printable character set will always be displayed in
the style of "cat -v", even if ispell thinks that these
characters are legal ISO Latin-1 on your system. This is
useful when working with older terminals. Without this
switch, ispell will display 8-bit characters "as is" if they
have been defined as string characters for the chosen file
type.
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ISPELL(1) UNIX System V (local) ISPELL(1)
"Normal" mode, as well as the -l, -a, and -A options (see
below) also accepts the following "common" flags on the
command line:
-t The input file is in TeX or LaTeX format.
-n The input file is in nroff/troff format.
-h The input file is in html format.
-b Create a backup file by appending ".bak" to the
name of the input file.
-x Don't create a backup file.
-B Report run-together words with missing blanks as
spelling errors.
-C Consider run-together words as legal compounds.
-P Don't generate extra root/affix combinations.
-m Make possible root/affix combinations that aren't
in the dictionary.
-S Sort the list of guesses by probable correctness.
-d file
Specify an alternate dictionary file. For
example, use -d deutsch to choose a German
dictionary in a German installation.
-p file
Specify an alternate personal dictionary.
-w chars
Specify additional characters that can be part of
a word.
-W n Specify length of words that are always legal.
-T type
Assume a given formatter type for all files.
The -n and -t options select whether ispell runs in
nroff/troff (-n) or TeX/LaTeX (-t) input mode (This does not
work for html (-h) mode. However html-mode is assumed for
any files with a ".html" or ".htm" extension unless
nroff/troff or TeX/LaTeX modes have been explicitly
defined). (The default mode is controlled by the DEFTEXFLAG
installation option.) TeX/LaTeX mode is also automatically
selected if an input file has the extension ".tex", unless
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overridden by the -n switch. In TeX/LaTeX mode, whenever a
backslash ("\") is found, ispell will skip to the next
whitespace or TeX/LaTeX delimiter. Certain commands contain
arguments which should not be checked, such as labels and
reference keys as are found in the \cite command, since they
contain arbitrary, non-word arguments. Spell checking is
also suppressed when in math mode. Thus, for example, given
\chapter {This is a Ckapter} \cite{SCH86}
ispell will find "Ckapter" but not "SCH". The -t option
does not recognize the TeX comment character "%", so
comments are also spell-checked. It also assumes correct
LaTeX syntax. Arguments to infrequently used commands and
some optional arguments are sometimes checked unnecessarily.
The bibliography will not be checked if ispell was compiled
with IGNOREBIB defined. Otherwise, the bibliography will be
checked but the reference key will not.
References for the tib(1) bibliography system, that is, text
between a ``[.'' or ``<.'' and ``.]'' or ``.>'' will always
be ignored in TeX/LaTeX mode.
The -b and -x options control whether ispell leaves a backup
(.bak) file for each input file. The .bak file contains the
pre-corrected text. If there are file opening / writing
errors, the .bak file may be left for recovery purposes even
with the -x option. The default for this option is
controlled by the DEFNOBACKUPFLAG installation option.
The -B and -C options control how ispell handles run-
together words, such as "notthe" for "not the". If -B is
specified, such words will be considered as errors, and
ispell will list variations with an inserted blank or hyphen
as possible replacements. If -C is specified, run-together
words will be considered to be legal compounds, so long as
both components are in the dictionary, and each component is
at least as long as a language-dependent minimum (3
characters, by default). This is useful for languages such
as German and Norwegian, where many compound words are
formed by concatenation. (Note that compounds formed from
three or more root words will still be considered errors).
The default for this option is language-dependent; in a
multi-lingual installation the default may vary depending on
which dictionary you choose.
The -P and -m options control when ispell automatically
generates suggested root/affix combinations for possible
addition to your personal dictionary. (These are the
entries in the "guess" list which are preceded by question
marks.) If -P is specified, such guesses are displayed only
if ispell cannot generate any possibilities that match the
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current dictionary. If -m is specified, such guesses are
always displayed. This can be useful if the dictionary has
a limited word list, or a word list with few suffixes.
However, you should be careful when using this option, as it
can generate guesses that produce illegal words. The
default for this option is controlled by the dictionary file
used.
The -S option suppresses ispell's normal behavior of sorting
the list of possible replacement words. Some people may
prefer this, since it somewhat enhances the probability that
the correct word will be low-numbered.
The -d option is used to specify an alternate hashed
dictionary file, other than the default. If the filename
does not contain a "/", the library directory for the
default dictionary file is prefixed; thus, to use a
dictionary in the local directory "-d ./xxx.hash" must be
used. This is useful to allow dictionaries for alternate
languages. Unlike previous versions of ispell, a dictionary
of /dev/null is illegal, because the dictionary contains the
affix table. If you need an effectively empty dictionary,
create a one-entry list with an unlikely string (e.g.,
"qqqqq").
The -p option is used to specify an alternate personal
dictionary file. If the file name does not begin with "/",
$HOME is prefixed. Also, the shell variable WORDLIST may be
set, which renames the personal dictionary in the same
manner. The command line overrides any WORDLIST setting.
If neither the -p switch nor the WORDLIST environment
variable is given, ispell will search for a personal
dictionary in both the current directory and $HOME, creating
one in $HOME if none is found. The preferred name is
constructed by appending ".ispell_" to the base name of the
hash file. For example, if you use the English dictionary,
your personal dictionary would be named ".ispell_english".
However, if the file ".ispell_words" exists, it will be used
as the personal dictionary regardless of the language hash
file chosen. This feature is included primarily for
backwards compatibility.
If the -p option is not specified, ispell will look for
personal dictionaries in both the current directory and the
home directory. If dictionaries exist in both places, they
will be merged. If any words are added to the personal
dictionary, they will be written to the current directory if
a dictionary already existed in that place; otherwise they
will be written to the dictionary in the home directory.
The -w option may be used to specify characters other than
alphabetics which may also appear in words. For instance,
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ISPELL(1) UNIX System V (local) ISPELL(1)-w "&" will allow "AT&T" to be picked up. Underscores are
useful in many technical documents. There is an admittedly
crude provision in this option for 8-bit international
characters. Non-printing characters may be specified in the
usual way by inserting a backslash followed by the octal
character code; e.g., "\014" for a form feed.
Alternatively, if "n" appears in the character string, the
(up to) three characters following are a DECIMAL code 0 -
255, for the character. For example, to include bells and
form feeds in your words (an admittedly silly thing to do,
but aren't most pedagogical examples):
n007n012
Numeric digits other than the three following "n" are simply
numeric characters. Use of "n" does not conflict with
anything because actual alphabetics have no meaning -
alphabetics are already accepted. Ispell will typically be
used with input from a file, meaning that preserving parity
for possible 8 bit characters from the input text is OK. If
you specify the -l option, and actually type text from the
terminal, this may create problems if your stty settings
preserve parity.
The -W option may be used to change the length of words that
ispell always accepts as legal. Normally, ispell will
accept all 1-character words as legal, which is equivalent
to specifying "-W 1." (The default for this switch is
actually controlled by the MINWORD installation option, so
it may vary at your installation.) If you want all words to
be checked against the dictionary, regardless of length, you
might want to specify "-W 0." On the other hand, if your
document specifies a lot of three-letter acronyms, you would
specify "-W 3" to accept all words of three letters or less.
Regardless of the setting of this option, ispell will only
generate words that are in the dictionary as suggested
replacements for words; this prevents the list from becoming
too long. Obviously, this option can be very dangerous,
since short misspellings may be missed. If you use this
option a lot, you should probably make a last pass without
it before you publish your document, to protect yourself
against errors.
The -T option is used to specify a default formatter type
for use in generating string characters. This switch
overrides the default type determined from the file name.
The type argument may be either one of the unique names
defined in the language affix file (e.g., nroff) or a file
suffix including the dot (e.g., .tex). If no -T option
appears and no type can be determined from the file name,
the default string character type declared in the language
affix file will be used.
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The -l or "list" option to ispell is used to produce a list
of misspelled words from the standard input.
The -a option is intended to be used from other programs
through a pipe. In this mode, ispell prints a one-line
version identification message, and then begins reading
lines of input. For each input line, a single line is
written to the standard output for each word checked for
spelling on the line. If the word was found in the main
dictionary, or your personal dictionary, then the line
contains only a '*'. If the word was found through affix
removal, then the line contains a '+', a space, and the root
word. If the word was found through compound formation
(concatenation of two words, controlled by the -C option),
then the line contains only a '-'.
If the word is not in the dictionary, but there are near
misses, then the line contains an '&', a space, the
misspelled word, a space, the number of near misses, the
number of characters between the beginning of the line and
the beginning of the misspelled word, a colon, another
space, and a list of the near misses separated by commas and
spaces. Following the near misses (and identified only by
the count of near misses), if the word could be formed by
adding (illegal) affixes to a known root, is a list of
suggested derivations, again separated by commas and spaces.
If there are no near misses at all, the line format is the
same, except that the '&' is replaced by '?' (and the near-
miss count is always zero). The suggested derivations
following the near misses are in the form:
[prefix+] root [-prefix] [-suffix] [+suffix]
(e.g., "re+fry-y+ies" to get "refries") where each optional
pfx and sfx is a string. Also, each near miss or guess is
capitalized the same as the input word unless such
capitalization is illegal; in the latter case each near miss
is capitalized correctly according to the dictionary.
Finally, if the word does not appear in the dictionary, and
there are no near misses, then the line contains a '#', a
space, the misspelled word, a space, and the character
offset from the beginning of the line. Each sentence of
text input is terminated with an additional blank line,
indicating that ispell has completed processing the input
line.
These output lines can be summarized as follows:
OK: *
Root:
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ISPELL(1) UNIX System V (local) ISPELL(1)
+ <root>
Compound:
-
Miss:
& <original> <count> <offset>: <miss>, <miss>,
..., <guess>, ...
Guess:
? <original> 0 <offset>: <guess>, <guess>, ...
None:
# <original> <offset>
For example, a dummy dictionary containing the words "fray",
"Frey", "fry", and "refried" might produce the following
response to the command "echo 'frqy refries | ispell -a -m
-d ./test.hash":
(#) International Ispell Version 3.0.05 (beta), 08/10/91
& frqy 3 0: fray, Frey, fry
& refries 1 5: refried, re+fry-y+ies
This mode is also suitable for interactive use when you want
to figure out the spelling of a single word.
The -A option works just like -a, except that if a line
begins with the string "&Include_File&", the rest of the
line is taken as the name of a file to read for further
words. Input returns to the original file when the include
file is exhausted. Inclusion may be nested up to five deep.
The key string may be changed with the environment variable
INCLUDE_STRING (the ampersands, if any, must be included).
When in the -a mode, ispell will also accept lines of single
words prefixed with any of '*', '&', '@', '+', '-', '~',
'#', '!', '%', or '^'. A line starting with '*' tells
ispell to insert the word into the user's dictionary
(similar to the I command). A line starting with '&' tells
ispell to insert an all-lowercase version of the word into
the user's dictionary (similar to the U command). A line
starting with '@' causes ispell to accept this word in the
future (similar to the A command). A line starting with
'+', followed immediately by tex or nroff will cause ispell
to parse future input according the syntax of that
formatter. A line consisting solely of a '+' will place
ispell in TeX/LaTeX mode (similar to the -t option) and '-'
returns ispell to nroff/troff mode (but these commands are
obsolete). However, string character type is not changed;
the '~' command must be used to do this. A line starting
with '~' causes ispell to set internal parameters (in
particular, the default string character type) based on the
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filename given in the rest of the line. (A file suffix is
sufficient, but the period must be included. Instead of a
file name or suffix, a unique name, as listed in the
language affix file, may be specified.) However, the
formatter parsing is not changed; the '+' command must be
used to change the formatter. A line prefixed with '#' will
cause the personal dictionary to be saved. A line prefixed
with '!' will turn on terse mode (see below), and a line
prefixed with '%' will return ispell to normal (non-terse)
mode. Any input following the prefix characters '+', '-',
'#', '!', or '%' is ignored, as is any input following the
filename on a '~' line. To allow spell-checking of lines
beginning with these characters, a line starting with '^'
has that character removed before it is passed to the
spell-checking code. It is recommended that programmatic
interfaces prefix every data line with an uparrow to protect
themselves against future changes in ispell.
To summarize these:
* Add to personal dictionary
@ Accept word, but leave out of dictionary
# Save current personal dictionary
~ Set parameters based on filename
+ Enter TeX mode
- Exit TeX mode
! Enter terse mode
% Exit terse mode
^ Spell-check rest of line
In terse mode, ispell will not print lines beginning with
'*', '+', or '-', all of which indicate correct words. This
significantly improves running speed when the driving
program is going to ignore correct words anyway.
The -s option is only valid in conjunction with the -a or -A
options, and only on BSD-derived systems. If specified,
ispell will stop itself with a SIGTSTP signal after each
line of input. It will not read more input until it
receives a SIGCONT signal. This may be useful for
handshaking with certain text editors.
The -f option is only valid in conjunction with the -a or -A
options. If -f is specified, ispell will write its results
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to the given file, rather than to standard output.
The -v option causes ispell to print its current version
identification on the standard output and exit. If the
switch is doubled, ispell will also print the options that
it was compiled with.
The -c, -e[1-4], and -D options of ispell, are primarily
intended for use by the munchlist shell script. The -c
switch causes a list of words to be read from the standard
input. For each word, a list of possible root words and
affixes will be written to the standard output. Some of the
root words will be illegal and must be filtered from the
output by other means; the munchlist script does this. As
an example, the command:
echo BOTHER | ispell -c
produces:
BOTHER BOTHE/R BOTH/R
The -e switch is the reverse of -c; it expands affix flags
to produce a list of words. For example, the command:
echo BOTH/R | ispell -e
produces:
BOTH BOTHER
An optional expansion level can also be specified. A level
of 1 (-e1) is the same as -e alone. A level of 2 causes the
original root/affix combination to be prepended to the line:
BOTH/R BOTH BOTHER
A level of 3 causes multiple lines to be output, one for
each generated word, with the original root/affix
combination followed by the word it creates:
BOTH/R BOTH
BOTH/R BOTHER
A level of 4 causes a floating-point number to be appended
to each of the level-3 lines, giving the ratio between the
length of the root and the total length of all generated
words including the root:
BOTH/R BOTH 2.500000
BOTH/R BOTHER 2.500000
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Finally, the -D flag causes the affix tables from the
dictionary file to be dumped to standard output.
Unless your system administrator has suppressed the feature
to save space, ispell is aware of the correct
capitalizations of words in the dictionary and in your
personal dictionary. As well as recognizing words that must
be capitalized (e.g., George) and words that must be all-
capitals (e.g., NASA), it can also handle words with
"unusual" capitalization (e.g., "ITCorp" or "TeX"). If a
word is capitalized incorrectly, the list of possibilities
will include all acceptable capitalizations. (More than one
capitalization may be acceptable; for example, my dictionary
lists both "ITCorp" and "ITcorp".)
Normally, this feature will not cause you surprises, but
there is one circumstance you need to be aware of. If you
use "I" to add a word to your dictionary that is at the
beginning of a sentence (e.g., the first word of this
paragraph if "normally" were not in the dictionary), it will
be marked as "capitalization required". A subsequent usage
of this word without capitalization (e.g., the quoted word
in the previous sentence) will be considered a misspelling
by ispell, and it will suggest the capitalized version. You
must then compare the actual spellings by eye, and then type
"I" to add the uncapitalized variant to your personal
dictionary. You can avoid this problem by using "U" to add
the original word, rather than "I".
The rules for capitalization are as follows:
(1) Any word may appear in all capitals, as in headings.
(2) Any word that is in the dictionary in all-lowercase
form may appear either in lowercase or capitalized (as
at the beginning of a sentence).
(3) Any word that has "funny" capitalization (i.e., it
contains both cases and there is an uppercase character
besides the first) must appear exactly as in the
dictionary, except as permitted by rule (1). If the
word is acceptable in all-lowercase, it must appear
thus in a dictionary entry.
buildhash
The buildhash program builds hashed dictionary files for
later use by ispell. The raw word list (with affix flags) is
given in dict-file, and the the affix flags are defined by
affix-file. The hashed output is written to hash-file. The
formats of the two input files are described in ispell(4).
The -s (silent) option suppresses the usual status messages
that are written to the standard error device.
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munchlist
The munchlist shell script is used to reduce the size of
dictionary files, primarily personal dictionary files. It
is also capable of combining dictionaries from various
sources. The given files are read (standard input if no
arguments are given), reduced to a minimal set of roots and
affixes that will match the same list of words, and written
to standard output.
Input for munchlist contains of raw words (e.g from your
personal dictionary files) or root and affix combinations
(probably generated in earlier munchlist runs). Each word
or root/affix combination must be on a separate line.
The -D (debug) option leaves temporary files around under
standard names instead of deleting them, so that the script
can be debugged. Warning: this option can eat up an
enormous amount of temporary file space.
The -v (verbose) option causes progress messages to be
reported to stderr so you won't get nervous that munchlist
has hung.
If the -s (strip) option is specified, words that are in the
specified hash-file are removed from the word list. This
can be useful with personal dictionaries.
The -l option can be used to specify an alternate affix-file
for munching dictionaries in languages other than English.
The -c option can be used to convert dictionaries that were
built with an older affix file, without risk of accidentally
introducing unintended affix combinations into the
dictionary.
The -T option allows dictionaries to be converted to a
canonical string-character format. The suffix specified is
looked up in the affix file (-l switch) to determine the
string-character format used for the input file; the output
always uses the canonical string-character format. For
example, a dictionary collected from TeX source files might
be converted to canonical format by specifying -T tex.
The -w option is passed on to ispell.
findaffix
The findaffix shell script is an aid to writers of new
language descriptions in choosing affixes. The given
dictionary files (standard input if none are given) are
examined for possible prefixes (-p switch) or suffixes (-s
switch, the default). Each commonly-occurring affix is
presented along with a count of the number of times it
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appears and an estimate of the number of bytes that would be
saved in a dictionary hash file if it were added to the
language table. Only affixes that generate legal roots
(found in the original input) are listed.
If the "-c" option is not given, the output lines are in the
following format:
strip/add/count/bytes
where strip is the string that should be stripped from a
root word before adding the affix, add is the affix to be
added, count is a count of the number of times that this
strip/add combination appears, and bytes is an estimate of
the number of bytes that might be saved in the raw
dictionary file if this combination is added to the affix
file. The field separator in the output will be the tab
character specified by the -t switch; the default is a
slash ("/").
If the -c ("clean output") option is given, the appearance
of the output is made visually cleaner (but harder to post-
process) by changing it to:
-strip+add<tab>count<tab>bytes
where strip, add, count, and bytes are as before, and <tab>
represents the ASCII tab character.
The method used to generate possible affixes will also
generate longer affixes which have common headers or
trailers. For example, the two words "moth" and "mother"
will generate not only the obvious substitution "+er" but
also "-h+her" and "-th+ther" (and possibly even longer ones,
depending on the value of min). To prevent cluttering the
output with such affixes, any affix pair that shares a
common header (or, for prefixes, trailer) string longer than
elim characters (default 1) will be suppressed. You may
want to set "elim" to a value greater than 1 if your
language has string characters; usually the need for this
parameter will become obvious when you examine the output of
your findaffix run.
Normally, the affixes are sorted according to the estimate
of bytes saved. The -f switch may be used to cause the
affixes to be sorted by frequency of appearance.
To save output file space, affixes which occur fewer than 10
times are eliminated; this limit may be changed with the -l
switch. The -M switch specifies a maximum affix length
(default 8). Affixes longer than this will not be reported.
(This saves on temporary disk space and makes the script run
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faster.)
Affixes which generate stems shorter than 3 characters are
suppressed. (A stem is the word after the strip string has
been removed, and before the add string has been added.)
This reduces both the running time and the size of the
output file. This limit may be changed with the -m switch.
The minimum stem length should only be set to 1 if you have
a lot of free time and disk space (in the range of many days
and hundreds of megabytes).
The findaffix script requires a non-blank field-separator
character for internal use. Normally, this character is a
slash ("/"), but if the slash appears as a character in the
input word list, a different character can be specified with
the -t switch.
Ispell dictionaries should be expanded before being fed to
findaffix; in addition, characters that are not in the
English alphabet (if any) should be translated to lowercase.
tryaffix
The tryaffix shell script is used to estimate the
effectiveness of a proposed prefix (-p switch) or suffix (-s
switch, the default) with a given expanded-file. Only one
affix can be tried with each execution of tryaffix, although
multiple arguments can be used to describe varying forms of
the same affix flag (e.g., the D flag for English can add
either D or ED depending on whether a trailing E is already
present). Each word in the expanded dictionary that ends
(or begins) with the chosen suffix (or prefix) has that
suffix (prefix) removed; the dictionary is then searched for
root words that match the stripped word. Normally, all
matching roots are written to standard output, but if the -c
(count) flag is given, only a statistical summary of the
results is written. The statistics given are a count of
words the affix potentially applies to and an estimate of
the number of dictionary bytes that a flag using the affix
would save. The estimate will be high if the flag generates
words that are currently generated by other affix flags
(e.g., in English, bathers can be generated by either bath/X
or bather/S).
The dictionary file, expanded-file, must already be expanded
(using the -e switch of ispell) and sorted, and things will
usually work best if uppercase has been folded to lower with
'tr'.
The affix arguments are things to be stripped from the
dictionary file to produce trial roots: for English, con
(prefix) and ing (suffix) are examples. The addition parts
of the argument are letters that would have been stripped
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off the root before adding the affix. For example, in
English the affix ing normally strips e for words ending in
that letter (e.g., like becomes liking) so we might run:
tryaffix ing ing+e
to cover both cases.
All of the shell scripts contain documentation as commentary
at the beginning; sometimes these comments contain useful
information beyond the scope of this manual page.
It is possible to install ispell in such a way as to only
support ASCII range text if desired.
icombine
The icombine program is a helper for munchlist. It reads a
list of words in dictionary format (roots plus flags) from
the standard input, and produces a reduced list on standard
output which combines common roots found on adjacent
entries. Identical roots which have differing flags will
have their flags combined, and roots which have differing
capitalizations will be combined in a way which only
preserves important capitalization information. The
optional aff-file specifies a language file which defines
the character sets used and the meanings of the various
flags. The -T switch can be used to select among
alternative string character types by giving a dummy suffix
that can be found in an altstringtype statement.
ijoin
The ijoin program is a re-implementation of join(1) which
handles long lines and 8-bit characters correctly. The -s
switch specifies that the sort(1) program used to prepare
the input to ijoin uses signed comparisons on 8-bit
characters; the -u switch specifies that sort(1) uses
unsigned comparisons. All other options and behaviors of
join(1) are duplicated as exactly as possible based on the
manual page, except that ijoin will not handle newline as a
field separator. See the join(1) manual page for more
information.
ENVIRONMENT
DICTIONARY
Default dictionary to use, if no -d flag is given.
WORDLIST
Personal dictionary file name
INCLUDE_STRING
Code for file inclusion under the -A option
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TMPDIR
Directory used for some of munchlist's temporary files
FILES
/usr/local/lib/english.hash
Hashed dictionary (may be found in some other local
directory, depending on the system).
/usr/local/lib/english.aff
Affix-definition file for munchlist
/usr/dict/web2 or /usr/dict/words
For the Lookup function (depending on the WORDS
compilation option).
$HOME/.ispell_hashfile
User's private dictionary
.ispell_hashfile
Directory-specific private dictionary
SEE ALSO
spell(1), egrep(1), look(1), join(1), sort(1), sq(1L),
tib(1L), ispell(4L), english(4L)
BUGS
It takes several to many seconds for ispell to read in the
hash table, depending on size.
When all options are enabled, ispell may take several
seconds to generate all the guesses at corrections for a
misspelled word; on slower machines this time is long enough
to be annoying.
The hash table is stored as a quarter-megabyte (or larger)
array, so a PDP-11 or 286 version does not seem likely.
Ispell should understand more troff syntax, and deal more
intelligently with contractions.
Although small personal dictionaries are sorted before they
are written out, the order of capitalizations of the same
word is somewhat random.
When the -x flag is specified, ispell will unlink any
existing .bak file.
There are too many flags, and many of them have non-mnemonic
names.
Munchlist does not deal very gracefully with dictionaries
which contain "non-word" characters. Such characters ought
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to be deleted from the dictionary with a warning message.
Findaffix and munchlist require tremendous amounts of
temporary file space for large dictionaries. They do
respect the TMPDIR environment variable, so this space can
be redirected. However, a lot of the temporary space needed
is for sorting, so TMPDIR is only a partial help on systems
with an uncooperative sort(1). ("Cooperative" is defined as
accepting the undocumented -T switch). At its peak usage,
munchlist takes 10 to 40 times the original dictionary's
size in Kb. (The larger ratio is for dictionaries that
already have heavy affix use, such as the one distributed
with ispell). Munchlist is also very slow; munching a
normal-sized dictionary (15K roots, 45K expanded words)
takes around an hour on a small workstation. (Most of this
time is spent in sort(1), and munchlist can run much faster
on machines that have a more modern sort that makes better
use of the memory available to it.) Findaffix is even
worse; the smallest English dictionary cannot be processed
with this script in a mere 50Kb of free space, and even
after specifying switches to reduce the temporary space
required, the script will run for over 24 hours on a small
workstation.
AUTHOR
Pace Willisson (pace@mit-vax), 1983, based on the PDP-10
assembly version. That version was written by R. E. Gorin
in 1971, and later revised by W. E. Matson (1974) and W. B.
Ackerman (1978).
Collected, revised, and enhanced for the Usenet by Walt
Buehring, 1987.
Table-driven multi-lingual version by Geoff Kuenning, 1987-
88.
Large dictionaries provided by Bob Devine (vianet!devine).
A complete list of contributors is too large to list here,
but is distributed with the ispell sources in the file
"Contributors".
VERSION
The version of ispell described by this manual page is
International Ispell Version 3.1.00, 10/08/93.
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