spellin & spellout

[Alexis Dimitriadis]

>>	... I can't make any sense of the man regarding spellin & spellout.  
>>	Can you help me?
>>
>>1.  Do they have any benefit for a non-superuser?
>>2.  Can they be used to maintain a private dictionary?
>>3.  Can I use spell with a private dictionary?
>>
>>	I have written my own private spelling checker and corrector
>>but it seems to me that spellin and spellout should help in this.
>>Right now, I'm relying on "comm" and "grep."

> "spellin" & "spellout"
> are of no use to anyone except the system spelling list maintainer.
> To use a local word list with the System V "spell", just name the
> list with a + prefix, as in:
> 	$ spell +mylist document

  I don't know what the +mylist does in System V, but the FAST way to
keep one's own private word list is to make it into a hash list.  (Assuming
there is no shortage of file space on the system, of course.  The hash list
is 50,000 characters long!!).
  The manual is not terribly clear, but spellin makes hashlists, and spellout 
looks up words in a hashlist.  
  Then, if you have a list of words in the file "mywords", you create a 
hashlist that includes your words plus the system dictionary with

	spellin /usr/dict/hlista < mywords > myhlist

(/usr/lib/hlista is the system hashlist).  Then you can make the system spell
use your hash list (INSTEAD of the system list), by calling it as in 

	spell -d myhlist textfile

At any rate, the above are true and tested on a VAX runing ULTRIX, a 4.2 BSD
clone.  If your system does not know -d, you may need to modify /usr/bin/spell.
(Which is a shell script, and calls /usr/lib/spell).  If /usr/lib/spell
has the hash list hardcoded in it, then you are on your own.


Alexis Dimitriadis
-- 
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             alexis @ reed

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