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ISPELL(1) General Commands Manual 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] [-o] [-b] [-x] [-B] [-C] [-P] [-m] [-S] [-d file] [-p file] [-w
chars] [-W n] [-T type] [-kname list] [-F program]
Helper programs:
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] [-w chars] [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 hy-
phen), 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 pre-
ceded 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 dic-
tionary.
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 op-
tion).
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 sum-
marize 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 char-
acters are valid ISO Latin-1 on your system. This is useful when working with older ter-
minals. 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 and interactive mode (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 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 every-
thing 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 dictio-
nary.
-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.
The -H, -n, -t, and -o options select whether ispell runs in HTML (-H), nroff/troff (-n),
TeX/LaTeX (-t), or ordinary text (-o) input mode. mode. (The default mode is controlled
by the DEFTEXFLAG installation option, but is normally nroff/troff mode for historical
reasons.) Unless overridden by one of the mode-selection switches, TeX/LaTeX mode is au-
tomatically selected if an input file has the extension ".tex", and HTML mode is automati-
cally selected if an input file has the extension ".html" or ".htm".
In HTML mode, HTML tags delimited by <> signs are skipped, except that the "ALT=" con-
struct is recognized if it appears with no spaces around the equals sign, and the text in-
side is spell-checked.
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 com-
ment 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 writ-
ing 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 spec-
ified, run-together words will be considered to be valid compounds, so long as both compo-
nents are in the dictionary, and each component is at least as long as a language-depen-
dent 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 rec-
ognize 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 dic-
tionary. 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 replace-
ment 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 de-
fault. If the filename does not contain a "/", the library directory for the default dic-
tionary 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 pre-
vious 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 ap-
pending ".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 compatibil-
ity.
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 ap-
pear 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 ex-
amples):
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 - alphabet-
ics 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 re-
placements for words; this prevents the list from becoming too long. Obviously, this op-
tion can be very dangerous, since short misspellings may be missed. If you use this op-
tion a lot, you should probably make a last pass without it before you publish your docu-
ment, 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 de-
clared 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", "docu-
mentstyle", "documentclass", "usepackage", "selectlanguage", "pagestyle", "pagenum-
bering", "hyphenation", "pageref", and "psfig", plus "bibliography" in some instal-
lations. 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 "ad-
dress". 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.
All of the above keyword lists can also be modified by environment variables whose names
are the same as above, except in uppercase, e.g., TEXSKIP1. The -k switch overrides (or
adds to) the environment variables, and the environment variables override or add to the
built-in defaults.
The -F switch specifies an external deformatter program. This program should read data
from its standard input and write to its standard output. The program must produce ex-
actly one character of output for each character of input, or ispell will lose synchro-
nization and corrupt the output file. Whitespace characters (especially blanks, tabs, and
newlines) and characters that should be spell-checked should be passed through unchanged.
Characters that should not be spell-checked should be converted into blanks or other non-
word characters. For example, an HTML deformatter might turn all HTML tags into blanks,
and also blank out all text delimited by tags such as "code" or "kbd".
The -F switch is the preferred way to deformat files for ispell, and eventually will be-
come the only way.
If ispell is invoked without any filenames or mode switches, it enters an interactive mode
designed to let the user check the spelling of individual words. The program repeatedly
prompts on standard output with "word:" and responds with either "ok" (possibly with com-
mentary), "not found", or "how about" followed by a list of suggestions.
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 af-
fix 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 op-
tion), 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 char-
acters 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. Fol-
lowing the near misses (and identified only by the count of near misses), if the word
could be formed by adding (invalid) affixes to a known root, is a list of suggested deri-
vations, 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 capi-
talization is invalid; in the latter case each near miss is capitalized correctly accord-
ing 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 addi-
tional 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 "&In-
clude_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 vari-
able 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 '+', fol-
lowed 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/La-
TeX mode (similar to the -t option) and '-' returns ispell to nroff/troff mode (but these
commands are obsolete). However, the string character type is not changed; the '~' com-
mand must be used to do this. A line starting with '~' causes ispell to set internal pa-
rameters (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. In-
stead 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. A line prefixed with '`'
will turn on verbose-correction mode (see below); this mode can only be disabled by turn-
ing on terse mode with '%'.
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 be-
ginning 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 is-
pell.
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
` Enter verbose-correction 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 pro-
gram is going to ignore correct words anyway.
In verbose-correction mode, ispell includes the original word immediately after the indi-
cator character in output lines beginning with '*', '+', and '-', which simplifies inter-
action for some programs.
The -s option is only valid in conjunction with the -a or -A options, and only on BSD-de-
rived 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\n5], and -D options of ispell, are primarily intended for use by the munch-
list shell script. The -c switch causes a list of words to be read from the standard in-
put. 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 invalid 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
A level of 5 causes multiple lines to be output, one for each generated word. If the gen-
erated word did not use any affixes, the line is just that word. If one or more affixes
were used, the original root and the affixes actually used are printed, joined by a plus
sign; then the generated word is printed:
BOTH
BOTH+R BOTHER
Finally, the -D flag causes the affix tables from the dictionary file to be dumped to
standard output.
Ispell is aware of the correct capitalizations of words in the dictionary and in your per-
sonal dictionary. As well as recognizing words that must be capitalized (e.g., George)
and words that must be all-capitals (e.g., NASA), it can also handle words with "unusual"
capitalization (e.g., "ITCorp" or "TeX"). If a word is capitalized incorrectly, the list
of possibilities will include all acceptable capitalizations. (More than one capitaliza-
tion 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 be-
ginning 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 vari-
ant to your personal dictionary. You can avoid this problem by using "U" to add the orig-
inal 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 low-
ercase 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 af-
fix-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 per-
sonal 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 delet-
ing 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 re-
moved 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 dic-
tionary.
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 con-
verted 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-occur-
ring affix is presented along with a count of the number of times it appears and an esti-
mate 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 in-
put) 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 af-
fix, 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 char-
acter.
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, charac-
ters 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 de-
scribe 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 (pre-
fix) 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 dictio-
nary bytes that a flag using the affix would save. The estimate will be high if the flag
generates words that are currently generated by other affix flags (e.g., in English,
bathers can be generated by either bath/X or bather/S).
The dictionary file, expanded-file, must already be expanded (using the -e switch of is-
pell) 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 de-
sired.
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 capitaliza-
tions 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.
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.
The -e flag should accept mnemonic arguments instead of numeric ones.
Munchlist does not deal very gracefully with dictionaries which contain "non-word" charac-
ters. Such characters ought to be deleted from the dictionary with a warning message.
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 is-
pell sources in the file "Contributors".
VERSION
The version of ispell described by this manual page is International Ispell Version 3.4.02
08 Jan 2021.
local ISPELL(1)
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