Computer Science
ISPELL(1) ISPELL(1)
NAME
ispell, buildhash, munchlist, findaffix, tryaffix, icom-
bine, 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] [-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 sug-
gested words. Commands are single characters as follows
(case is ignored):
R Replace the misspelled word completely.
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 (con-
trolled by the WORDS compilation option).
X Write the rest of this file, ignoring mis-
spellings, 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. Con-
versely, 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 dis-
played in the style of "cat -v", even if ispell thinks
that these characters are legal ISO Latin-1 on your sys-
tem. 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.
"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.
-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 com-
pounds.
-P Don't generate extra root/affix combina-
tions.
-m Make possible root/affix combinations that
aren't in the dictionary.
-S Sort the list of guesses by probable cor-
rectness.
-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. (The
default is controlled by the DEFTEXFLAG installation
option.) TeX/LaTeX mode is also automatically selected if
an input file has the extension ".tex", unless 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 com-
ments are also spell-checked. It also assumes correct
LaTeX syntax. Arguments to infrequently used commands and
some optional arguments are sometimes checked unnecessar-
ily. The bibliography will not be checked if ispell was
compiled with IGNOREBIB defined. Otherwise, the bibliog-
raphy 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 open-
ing / writing errors, the .bak file may be left for recov-
ery purposes even with the -x option. The default for
this option is controlled by the DEFNOBACKUPFLAG installa-
tion 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 min-
imum (3 characters, by default). This is useful for lan-
guages 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 consid-
ered 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 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 ille-
gal words. The default for this option is controlled by
the dictionary file used.
The -S option suppresses ispell's normal behavior of sort-
ing the list of possible replacement words. Some people
may prefer this, since it somewhat enhances the probabil-
ity that the correct word will be low-numbered.
The -d option is used to specify an alternate hashed dic-
tionary 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 dic-
tionary 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 dictio-
nary of /dev/null is illegal, because the dictionary con-
tains 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 set-
ting. If neither the -p switch nor the WORDLIST environ-
ment variable is given, ispell will search for a personal
dictionary in both the current directory and $HOME, creat-
ing 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 dic-
tionary, your personal dictionary would be named
".ispell_english". However, if the file ".ispell_words"
exists, it will be used as the personal dictionary regard-
less 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 per-
sonal 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,
-w "&" will allow "AT&T" to be picked up. Underscores are
useful in many technical documents. There is an admit-
tedly crude provision in this option for 8-bit interna-
tional characters. Non-printing characters may be speci-
fied 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 sim-
ply 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 pre-
vents 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 prob-
ably 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.
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 forma-
tion (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 mis-
spelled word, a space, the number of near misses, the num-
ber 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 dic-
tionary.
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 char-
acter offset from the beginning of the line. Each sen-
tence 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: + <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 envi-
ronment variable INCLUDE_STRING (the ampersands, if any,
must be included).
When in the -a mode, ispell will also accept lines of sin-
gle 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 com-
mand). 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 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 for-
matter. 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-check-
ing code. It is recommended that programmatic interfaces
prefix every data line with an uparrow to protect them-
selves 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 speci-
fied, 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 hand-
shaking 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 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 combina-
tion 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
Finally, the -D flag causes the affix tables from the dic-
tionary file to be dumped to standard output.
Unless your system administrator has suppressed the fea-
ture to save space, ispell is aware of the correct capi-
talizations of words in the dictionary and in your per-
sonal 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 dic-
tionary 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 head-
ings.
(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 char-
acter 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.
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 acci-
dentally 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 dic-
tionary files (standard input if none are given) are exam-
ined 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
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 dictio-
nary file if this combination is added to the affix file.
The field separator in the output will be the tab charac-
ter 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 clutter-
ing 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 sup-
pressed. 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 exam-
ine 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 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 speci-
fied 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 lower-
case.
tryaffix
The tryaffix shell script is used to estimate the effec-
tiveness 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 vary-
ing 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 dictio-
nary 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 poten-
tially applies to and an estimate of the number of dictio-
nary 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 off the root before adding the affix. For exam-
ple, 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 commen-
tary 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 adja-
cent entries. Identical roots which have differing flags
will have their flags combined, and roots which have dif-
fering 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 alterna-
tive 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 char-
acters; 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 informa-
tion.
ENVIRONMENT
DICTIONARY
Default dictionary to use, if no -d flag is given.
CHARSET
Only read if DICTIONARY is set. Default formatter
type or character encoding to use, if no -T or -t
or -n flag is given. Usefull if formatter type is
recognized in affix-file.
WORDLIST
Personal dictionary file name
INCLUDE_STRING
Code for file inclusion under the -A option
TMPDIR Directory used for some of munchlist's temporary
files
FILES
/usr/lib/ispell/english.hash
Hashed dictionary (may be found in some other local
directory, depending on the system).
/usr/lib/ispell/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 sec-
onds to generate all the guesses at corrections for a mis-
spelled 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 to be deleted from the dictionary with a warning
message.
Findaffix and munchlist require tremendous amounts of tem-
porary 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 sys-
tems 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 dictio-
naries 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 worksta-
tion. (Most of this time is spent in sort(1), and munch-
list can run much faster on machines that have a more mod-
ern sort that makes better use of the memory available to
it.) Findaffix is even worse; the smallest English dic-
tionary 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.
local 1
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