April 22, 2023

Spellcheck a file in the shell (terminal)

For example, to spellcheck the file letter.txt run:

$ aspell check letter.txt

The shell (a.k.a terminal) will display an interactive screen suggesting corrections. You can choose to ignore the highlighted word, accept a suggestion et cetera.

To learn more about aspell, run $ man aspell in your shell.

You might notice that when you spellcheck and modify a file, aspell creates a backup of that file by making a copy and appending .bak to the file name. To tell aspell not to create a backup file, add the option -x to the command.

aspell is copyleft-licensed and maintained by Kevin Atkinson.

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