is the standard
English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to t ...
spell checker In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic ...
for
Unix
Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
,
Plan 9 Plan 9 or Plan Nine may refer to:
Music
* Plan 9 (band), a psychedelic rock band from Rhode Island
* ''Plan 9'', an album by Big Guitars From Memphis with Rick Lindy
* "Plan 9", a song on the 1993 album ''Gorgeous'' by electronica band 808 Stat ...
, and
Unix-like
A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
s.
Appearing in
Version 6 Unix
Sixth Edition Unix, also called Version 6 Unix or just V6, was the first version of the Unix operating system to see wide release outside Bell Labs. It was released in May 1975 and, like its direct predecessor, targeted the DEC PDP-11 family of m ...
,
was originally written by
Stephen C. Johnson of
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
in 1975.
Douglas McIlroy
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy (born 1932) is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2019 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College.
McIlroy is best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines and developed se ...
later improved its accuracy, performance, and memory use, and described his work and ''spell'' in general in his 1982 paper
Development of a Spelling list.
Spell has a simple
command-line interface: It goes over all the words in a given text file, and prints a sorted list of unique misspelled words in that file. It does not provide any interface for looking for those words in the file, or helping to correct the mistakes. In 1983, a different spell-checker, (the ''interactive'' spell-checker), was ported to Unix. had a user interface for showing the spelling mistakes in context and suggesting how to correct them. Since then, the original Spell tool has been mostly considered obsolete.
Another reason Spell is considered obsolete is that it only supports the English language. Modern spell-checkers for Unix and
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
systems, such as
aspell,
MySpell
MySpell is a spell checker that was formerly included with OOo Writer of the free OpenOffice.org office suite.
Since version 2.0.2, OpenOffice.org has replaced MySpell with Hunspell.
Background
MySpell was started by Kevin Hendricks in an attem ...
and
hunspell
Hunspell is a spell checker and morphological analyser designed for languages with rich morphology and complex word compounding and character encoding, originally designed for the Hungarian language.
Hunspell is based on MySpell and is backwa ...
, support a multitude of different languages and character sets.
The
Single Unix Specification has officially declared Spell a "legacy application", stating that this was done "because there is no known technology that can be used to make it recognise general language for user-specified input without providing a complete dictionary along with the input file."
Nevertheless, the Single Unix Specification does not standardize any other spell-checking utility to take Spell's place.
Because of Spell's problems and the superiority of its alternatives, a
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...
version of McIlroy's has never been written. Instead, in 1996 Thomas Morgan of
GNU
GNU () is an extensive collection of free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any ...
wrote a simple wrapper to (which was already popular at the time) to replicate spell's original behaviour. Many
Linux distributions
A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading on ...
include this GNU , or an even simpler
shell script
A shell script is a computer program designed to be run by a Unix shell, a command-line interpreter. The various dialects of shell scripts are considered to be scripting languages. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manip ...
; For example, the "" command in
Fedora Linux
Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. Fedora contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be on the leading edge of open-source technologies. Fedora is the upstream (softwa ...
simply runs , as:
cat "$@" , aspell -l --mode=none , sort -u
See also
*
ispell
Ispell is a spelling checker for Unix that supports most Western languages. It offers several interfaces, including a programmatic interface for use by editors such as Emacs. Unlike GNU Aspell, ispell will only suggest corrections that are based ...
*
aspell
*
MySpell
MySpell is a spell checker that was formerly included with OOo Writer of the free OpenOffice.org office suite.
Since version 2.0.2, OpenOffice.org has replaced MySpell with Hunspell.
Background
MySpell was started by Kevin Hendricks in an attem ...
*
pspell
The purpose of Pspell (Portable Spell Checker Interface Library) was to provide a generic interface to the system spelling checking libraries. It was, and sometimes still is, used in computer programming such as C, and is licensed under the GNU ...
*
hunspell
Hunspell is a spell checker and morphological analyser designed for languages with rich morphology and complex word compounding and character encoding, originally designed for the Hungarian language.
Hunspell is based on MySpell and is backwa ...
References
External links
Original Unix spell source code(link does not work)
*
{{Plan 9 commands
1975 software
Standard Unix programs
Plan 9 commands