aspell command | InMotion Hosting

Everyone needs a little spell checking in their routine. Even the best of us make mistakes. This article goes over the ‘aspell‘ Linux command for spell checking the contents of files that you specify.

Command: aspell
Synopsis: aspell [options] ]

Commands:

Command	Long Name	Description
-?	help	Displays the help information.
-c	check filename	Spell checks a specific file. This is the most used purpose for the aspell command.
-list		Displays a list of misspelled words from the command line.
-v	version	Displays the version number.

Options:
Below are the different options that are available to customize the aspell command.

Option	Long Name	Description
-W	–ignore=n	Aspell will ignore words less than or equal to n characters in length.
	–ignore-case=true/false	Sets whether to ignore case or not. It is set to false by default, meaning aspell is case sensitive.
	–sug-mode=mode	You can set between different modes: ultra, fast, normal (default), and bad-spellers

Examples

Spell checking a specific file

Here we give the most common base use for the aspell command. To do this, simply use the -c option and then list the file you want to check. The example below shows how to check a file named test.txt.

 # aspell -c test.txt

Spell check without regard to case

If you want to make the spell checker case insensitive, use the following example. You can see we use the previous example and add the –ignore-case=true option.

 # aspell --ignore-case=true -c test.txt

Spell check but ignore smaller words

In this example, we do a spell check on the test.txt file but we want to ignore words of less than 7 characters in length. Again, we use the first example and simply add the –ignore=7 option. You can change the number to be any length you want.

 # aspell --ignore=7 -c test.txt

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