25 Checking the Spelling of Individual Words


#25 Checking the Spelling of Individual Words

High-end programs like StarOffice, OpenOffice.org, and Microsoft Word include built-in spell-checking software, but the more rudimentary commandline question of whether a single word is spelled correctly or not is beyond the ability of any of these applications.

Similarly, most Unixes include a spell-check package that works reasonably well, albeit with a crusty interface. Given an input file or data stream, the packages generate a long list of all possible misspellings. Some spell-check packages include interactive spell-check applications. Again, however, none of them offer a simple way to check the spelling of a single word.

Don't have a spell-check program installed?  

For those Unix distributions that don't have a spell package ” though, really, all of 'em should nowadays, with disk space so cheap ” an excellent option is to install ispell , from http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/ispell.html

The Code

 #!/bin/sh # checkspelling - Checks the spelling of a word. spell="ispell -l"         # if you have ispell installed                           # if not, just define spell=aspell or                           # equivalent if [ $# -lt 1 ] ; then   echo "Usage: 
 #!/bin/sh # checkspelling - Checks the spelling of a word. spell="ispell -l" # if you have ispell installed # if not, just define spell=aspell or # equivalent if [ $# -lt 1 ] ; then echo "Usage: $0 word or words" >&2; exit 1 fi for word do if [ -z $(echo $word  $spell) ] ; then echo "$word: spelled correctly." else echo "$word: misspelled ." fi done exit 0 
word or words" >&2; exit 1 fi for word do if [ -z $(echo $word $spell) ] ; then echo "$word: spelled correctly." else echo "$word: misspelled." fi done exit 0

Running the Script

To use this script, simply specify one or more words as arguments of the checkspelling command.

The Results

It's now easy to ascertain the correct spelling of "their":

 $  checkspelling thier their  thier:          misspelled. their:          spelled correctly. 

Hacking the Script

There's quite a bit you can do with a spelling utility and, for that matter, quite a bit that ispell can already accomplish. This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, as you'll see in the next script.




Wicked Cool Shell Scripts. 101 Scripts for Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix Systems
Wicked Cool Shell Scripts
ISBN: 1593270127
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 150
Authors: Dave Taylor

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