Just FYI. If you only care about American spell checking, you'll have
no problems. Otherwise you may be interested to know that spell was
replaced by a shell script that called ispell, around the time of RH 5
or 6.
But RH's spell script was dead stupid. I think it accepted one option,
instead of spell's 5 or 6. I wrote a replacement script that did
right thing, calling ispell.
I reported this bug to RH, including the fix, which they ignored.
Later, ispell was replaced by a shell script that calls aspell.
RH's ispell script is badly broken. Also, aspell appears not to
support a dictionary option (if you can trust the silly ispell
script). Nor does aspell come with a man page.
I'm not sure if there's any point in reporting it again to RH.
Just thought I'd let slug people know of the problem.
FWIW, the fixed spell script *if* you still have a real ispell
executable, is attached. When I fix the aspell script at home, I'll
post that if anyone's interested.
luke
#!/bin/sh
#
# Make ispell work a bit more like spell.
#
# Author: Luke Kendall
#
for arg
do
case "x$arg" in
x-b) # British spelling
SPARGS="$SPARGS -d english"
;;
x-i) # Make deroff ignore .so and .nx commands.
SPARGS="$SPARGS -n"
;;
x-l) # Follow the chains of all included files. How?
;;
x-v) # Print all words not literally in the spelling list
SPARGS="$SPARGS -m"
;;
x-x) # Print every plausible stem, one per line, with = preceding
SPARGS="$SPARGS -m"
;;
x+*) # local spelling word file, 1 per line, sorted
pdict=`expr "x$arg" : "x\+\(.*\)"`
SPARGS="$SPARGS -p '$pdict'"
;;
*)
FILES="$FILES '$arg'"
;;
esac
done
eval "cat $FILES | ispell -l $SPARGS | sort -u"
