UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

# cat wrong.txt
thiis is going to be wrong words containing file

# aspell list < wrong.txt
thiis

I want to check only one word and see the first suggestions ("this" in this case). something like...
aspell list --one-word thiis --suggest

aspell -a or aspell pipe will check stdin so

Code:

echo thiis |aspell -a

and if you want the suggestions for each misspelled word in a file

Code:

for w in $(aspell list <spell.check.this); do echo $w |aspell pipe; done

Hi,
The first example below is what you have suggested. Since I want only the first value, I have added some code as shown in example 2 below. Is there a better way to do what I am trying? Is there any way to remove the extra enter mark?

# echo thiis |aspell -a
@(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.3)
& thiis 21 0: this, Thais, thous, thus, Thia's, Thurs, theirs, thighs, Th's, thins, Thieu's, thaws, thees, thews, Theo's, Thor's, Thur's, thigh's, Thar's, Thea's, thew's

# echo thiis |aspell -a | awk -F: '{print $2}' | awk '{print $1}' | sed s/,//g

this

Code:

echo thiis |aspell -a | grep "&" |awk -F: '{print $2}' | awk '{print $1}' | sed s/,//g

Thanks a lot.
I hope there will be no problem if I use it in my web application where a lot of words will be corrected simultaneously (no issue with performance)

hmm, there maybe performance issues as each time this is run there are 7 processes being created and destroyed. This could ramp up quite remarkably on a web server.

If 1 user checks a 100 word document that will involve 700 separate processes. If at the same time the web server is processing say 10 requests to check 10 documents of 100 words then that is 7000 processes, so you can see how that could be a problem.

One solution if performance does become an issue is to recommend that your users use firefox or safari as their browser as they both have integrated spell checking for text boxes.

In the meantime it may be worthwhile trying to find a more efficient solution depending on your specific situation and traffic statistics.