The "spell" Utility
July 19, 1998
Another excellent utility is the "spell"
utility that allows a reasonable degree of spell checking. The utility
uses the dictionary provided by UNIX but may also consider your
own personal dictionary file for personalized spell checking.
Consider the following example in which "writing" is spelled
as "qriting" on the first line of the letter body:
![[spell Example]](Images/spell.gif)
As you would expect, the "spell" utility comes with
several useful options. The more common ones are listed below.
| Option |
Explanation |
| -b |
Uses British spellings |
| -v |
Shows words not literally in the dictionary as well as a list
of possible correct spellings |
| -x |
Displays possible word stems for each word checked |
| +user_dictionary_file |
Defines the location of a user dictionary file to supplement
the UNIX dictionary |
The most important option of course is the user
defined dictionary file. Most likely, you will want to create
your own dictionary with your own word list. This file should simply
contain a list of words (one word per line). If spell does not find
the word in the UNIX dictionary, it will look at your dictionary file
as well. Thus, in the next example, you see that though the UNIX
dictionary does not recognize certain HTML commands, "spell" accepts
them because they are defined in my own dictionary.
![[spell and dictionary Example]](Images/spell_dict.gif)
The "uniq" Utility
Introduction to UNIX for Web Developers | Table of Contents
The "wc" Utility
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