NAME
ispell, buildhash, munchlist, findaffix, tryaffix, icombine, ijoin - Interactive spelling checkingSYNOPSIS
ispell [common-flags] [-M|-N] [-Lcontext] [-V] files- common-flags:
- [-t] [-n] [-H] [-o] [-b] [-x] [-B] [-C] [-P] [-m] [-S] [-d file] [-p file] [-w chars] [-W n] [-T type] [-kname list] [-F program]
- munchlist
- [-l aff-file] [-c conv-file]
[-T suffix]
- findaffix
- [-p|-s] [-f] [-c] [-m
min] [-M max] [-e elim]
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.
- -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 SGML/HTML format. (This should really be -s, but for historical reasons that flag was already taken.)
- -o
- The input file should be treated as ordinary text. (This could be used to override DEFTEXFLAG.)
- -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
- Delete the backup file after spell-checking is finished.
- -B
- Report run-together words with missing blanks as spelling errors.
- -C
- Consider run-together words as valid 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 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 valid.
- -T type
- Assume a given formatter type for all files.
\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 (if available on your system), 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 or 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 valid 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. Warning: the -C option can cause ispell to
recognize non-words and misspellings. Use it with caution!
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 invalid 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 invalid,
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.
It is not possible to use -w with certain characters. In particular, the
flag-marker character for the language (defined in the affix file, but usually
"/") can never be made into a word character.
The -W option may be used to change the length of words that
ispell always accepts as valid. Normally, ispell will accept all
1-character words as valid, 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 -k option is used to enhance the behavior of certain deformatters.
The name parameter gives the name of a deformatter keyword set (see
below), and the list parameter gives a list of one or more keywords
that are to be treated specially. If list begins with a plus (+) sign,
it is added to the existing keywords; otherwise it replaces the existing
keyword list. For example, -ktexskip1 +bibliographystyle adds
"bibliographystyle" to the TeX skip-1 list, while -khtmlignore
pre,strong replaces the HTML ignore list with "pre" and
"strong". The lists available are:
- texskip1
- TeX/LaTeX commands that take a single argument that should not be spell-checked, such as "bibliographystyle". The default is "end", "vspace", "hspace", "cite", "ref", "parbox", "label", "input", "nocite", "include", "includeonly", "documentstyle", "documentclass", "usepackage", "selectlanguage", "pagestyle", "pagenumbering", "hyphenation", "pageref", and "psfig", plus "bibliography" in some installations. These keywords are case-sensitive.
- texskip2
- TeX/LaTeX commands that take two arguments that should not be spell-checked, such as "setlength". The default is "rule", "setcounter", "addtocounter", "setlength", "addtolength", and "settowidth". These keywords are case-sensitive.
- htmlignore
- HTML tags that delimit text that should not be spell-checked until the matching end tag is reached. The default is "code", "samp", "kbd", "pre", "listing", and "address". These keywords are case-insensitive. (Note that the content inside HTML tags, such as HREF=, is not normally checked.)
- htmlcheck
- Subfields that should be spell-checked even inside HTML tags. The default is "alt", so that the ALT= portion of IMG tags will be spell-checked. These keywords are case-insensitive.
[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 invalid;
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>
(#) International Ispell Version 3.0.05 (beta), 08/10/91 & frqy 3 0: fray, Frey, fry & refries 1 5: refried, re+fry-y+ies
- *
- 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
- `
- Enter verbose-correction mode
- ^
- Spell-check rest of line
echo BOTHER | ispell -c
produces:
BOTHER BOTHE/R BOTH/R
echo BOTH/R | ispell -e
produces:
BOTH BOTHER
BOTH/R BOTH BOTHER
BOTH/R BOTH BOTH/R BOTHER
BOTH/R BOTH 2.500000 BOTH/R BOTHER 2.500000
BOTH BOTH+R BOTHER
- (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 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: on a multiuser system, this can be a security hole. To avoid possible destruction of important files, don't run the script as root, and set MUNCHDEBUGDIR to the name of a directory that only you can access. 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 valid 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
- -strip+add<tab>count<tab>bytes
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
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. The -w switch is identical to the same switch in ispell.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.
- ISPELL_CHARSET
- Formatter type or character encoding to use, if none is chosen by a flag option.
- 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
- MUNCHDEBUGDIR
- Directory used to hold the output of munchlists' -D option.
- TEXSKIP1
- List of single-argument TeX keywords that ispell should ignore.
- TEXSKIP2
- List of two-argument TeX keywords that ispell should ignore.
- HTMLIGNORE
- List of HTML keywords that delimit text that should not be spell-checked.
- HTMLCHECK
- List of HTML fields that should always be spell-checked, even inside a tag.
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/share/dict/words
- For the Lookup function.
- $HOME/.ispell_hashfile
- User's private dictionary
- .ispell_hashfile
- Directory-specific private dictionary
SEE ALSO
egrep(1), look(1), join(1), sort(1), spell(1), sq(1), tib (if available on your system), ispell(5), english(5)BUGS
Ispell should understand more troff syntax, and deal more intelligently with contractions.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 3.4.05 11 Mar 2022.local |