ISPELL(1) 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 dic
tionary 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 sin
gle 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 (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.
"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. (This works well for
XML and SGML format, too.)
-g The input file is in Debian control file format. Ispell
will ignore everything outside the Description(s).
-b Create a backup file by appending ".bak" to the name of
the input file.
-x Dont keep the backup file (it is still created when
changes are made).
-B Report run-together words with missing blanks as spelling
errors.
-C Consider run-together words as legal compounds.
-P Dont generate extra root/affix combinations.
-m Make possible root/affix combinations that arent in the
dictionary.
-S Sort the list of guesses by probable correctness.
-d file
Specify an alternate dictionary file. For example, use
-d british to choose /usr/lib/ispell/british.{aff|hash}
instead of your default ispell dictionary.
-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. How
ever html-mode is assumed for any files with a ".html" or ".htm" exten
sion unless nroff/troff or TeX/LaTeX modes have been explicitly
defined). (The default mode is controlled by the DEFTEXFLAG installa
tion 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 com
mands 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 rec
ognize the TeX comment character "%", so comments are also spell-
checked. It also assumes correct LaTeX syntax. Arguments to infre
quently used commands and some optional arguments are sometimes checked
unnecessarily. The bibliography will not be checked if ispell was com
piled 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 sug
gested root/affix combinations for possible addition to your personal
dictionary. (These are the entries in the "guess" list which are pre
ceded by question marks.) If -P is specified, such guesses are dis
played only if ispell cannot generate any possibilities that match the
current dictionary. If -m is specified, such guesses are always dis
played. 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 ispells 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 effec
tively 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 dictio
nary in the same manner. The command line overrides any WORDLIST set
ting. If neither the -p switch nor the WORDLIST environment variable
is given, ispell will search for a personal dictionary in both the cur
rent 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 dic
tionaries 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 cur
rent 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 admittedly crude provision in this option for 8-bit inter
national 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 DEC
IMAL code 0 - 255, for the character. For example, to include bells
and form feeds in your words (an admittedly silly thing to do, but
arent 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.
The -l or "list" option to ispell is used to produce a list of mis
spelled 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 dictio
nary, 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 com
pound 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 com
mas 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 dictio
nary.
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: +
Compound:
-
Miss: & : , , ...,
, ...
Guess: ? 0 : , , ...
None: #
For example, a dummy dictionary containing the words "fray", "Frey",
"fry", and "refried" might produce the following response to the com
mand "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 pre
fixed with any of *, &, @, +, -, ~, #, !, %, or ^.
A line starting with * tells ispell to insert the word into the
users dictionary (similar to the I command). A line starting with &
tells ispell to insert an all-lowercase version of the word into the
users dictionary (similar to the U command). A line starting with @
causes ispell to accept this word in the future (similar to the A com
mand). 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.) How
ever, 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 recom
mended 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 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 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
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" cap
italization (e.g., "ITCorp" or "TeX"). If a word is capitalized incor
rectly, the list of possibilities will include all acceptable capital
izations. (More than one capitalization may be acceptable; for exam
ple, 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 sug
gest 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(5). 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 dic
tionary 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 wont 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 per
sonal dictionaries.
The -l option can be used to specify an alternate affix-file for munch
ing 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 unin
tended 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-charac
ter 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 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 out
put is made visually cleaner (but harder to post-process) by changing
it to:
-strip+addcountbytes
where strip, add, count, and bytes are as before, and 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 substitu
tion "+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 parame
ter 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 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 char
acter 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 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 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 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 impor
tant 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 compar
isons 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
TMPDIR Directory used for some of munchlists temporary files
FILES
!!LIBDIR!!/!!DEFHASH!!
Hashed dictionary (may be found in some other local directory,
depending on the system).
!!LIBDIR!!/!!DEFLANG!!
Affix-definition file for munchlist
/usr/share/dict/web2 or /usr/share/dict/words
For the Lookup function (depending on the WORDS compilation
option).
$HOME/.ispell_hashfile
Users 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(5L), english(5L)
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 gener
ate 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 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 tem
porary 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 dictionarys 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; munch
ing 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 pro
cessed 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 ver
sion. 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 dis
tributed 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 ISPELL(1)
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