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.
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
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
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 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, -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.
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:
+ <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 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 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" 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(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 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 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
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 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
TMPDIR
Directory used for some of munchlist's temporary files
FILES
/usr/lib/ispell/default.hash
Hashed dictionary (may be found in some other local directory, depending on the
system).
/usr/lib/ispell/default.aff
Affix-definition file for munchlist
/usr/dict/web2 or /usr/share/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(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 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 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.