bobvan (11/10/82)
A recent net.general article asked if there wasn't something that could be done to improve the poor spelling seen on the net. The code presented here won't cure poor spelling, but can help those who want to improve. The first thing you should do is to get in the habit of using spell(1) regularly. A few lines in your bin directory can make the benefit even greater. Simply create your own version of spell that logs all errors detected. This should look something like: #! /bin/sh spell $* | tee -a $HOME/spell.errors Users of vispell need something like this: #! /bin/sh tee /tmp/vis$$ echo SpellingList spell /tmp/vis$$ | tee -a $HOME/spell.errors rm /tmp/vis$$ Then you should run the following pipeline about once a month to get a list of your most common spelling mistakes. sort -d $HOME/spell.errors | uniq -c | awk '$1 > 1' | sort -rn System administrators can assist by taking advantage of the log kept by spell. The file /usr/dict/spellhist contains a list of all words rejected by the spell. Once per month, I run a pipeline like the one above on this file. I add any legitimate words or local abbreviations to the dictionary. This reduces the number of "false hits" from spell, thereby encouraging people to use it more regularly. I generaly put the most commonly misspelled words into /etc/motd for a few days. I am no expert on spelling or word usage, so I ask for help when making these judgements. Here is the pipeline that I run with the monthly accounting: : Spelling history : egrep -v "tty??|tty[0-9][0-9]|ttyd[0-9]" /usr/dict/spellhist |\ sort -d |\ uniq -c |\ awk '$1 > 4' |\ sort -rn |\ tee -a /usr/dict/cumhist |\ pr -h 'MONTHLY: Most frequently misspelled words' |\ lpr cp /dev/null /usr/dict/spellhist Interestingly enough, the most frequently misspelled "word" list last month was "SpellingList" -- we are heavy vispell users at this site. Bob Van Valzah (...!decvax!ittvax!tpdcvax!bobvan)