Spell–checking and dictionary manipulation
Most Linux distributions include a dictionary file. However, very few people are aware of this, thus spelling errors abound. The aspell
command-line utility is a spell checker. Let's go through a few scripts that make use of the dictionary file and the spell checker.
How to do it...
The /usr/share/dict/
directory contains one or perhaps more dictionary files, which are text files with a list of words. We can use this list to check whether a word is a dictionary word or not:
$ ls /usr/share/dict/ american-english british-english
To check whether the given word is a dictionary word, use the following script:
#!/bin/bash #Filename: checkword.sh word=$1 grep "^$1$" /usr/share/dict/british-english -q if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo $word is a dictionary word; else echo $word is not a dictionary word; fi
The usage is as follows:
$ ./checkword.sh ful ful is not a dictionary word $ ./checkword.sh fool fool is a dictionary word
How it works...
In grep...