Problems with the UNIX spell utilities

[Phillip MacQueen]

  In simplest form, my questions are these:

  1) How can I get the word lists that make up the hashed word lists
/usr/lib/spell/hlista and /usr/lib/spell/hlistb ?
  2) Was hlista above made from the file /usr/dict/words ?
  3) Given those word lists, how can I remake hlista and hlistb (after
adding to them, perhaps)?

  I've tried everything that I can think of based of the man page for
spell, but haven't had any success with the above questions.  I have
a SPARCstation 2 running SunOS 4.1.1 and it has the utilities
hashcheck, hashmake, spellin, and spell.
  I can't get hashcheck to work.  The command `hashcheck hlista' goes
into the weeds (never terminates), and so I tried the following
sequence of commands.  If I'm reading the man pages correctly, it should
recover the word file with which it started.

setenv D /usr/lib/spell					 ; previously set.
cat word_list | $D/hashmake | $D/spellin 5 > word_hlist	 ; see below
$D/hashcheck word_hlist > recovered_word_list
cmp word_list recovered_word_list		; no difference expected.

where `word_list' is a text file containing 5 words (one per line and in
alphabetical order).

I never get to run the cmp line because hashcheck always goes into the
weeds.  The file recovered_word_list gets created, but nothing is written
into it.

  I'd appreciate any help in determining what I'm doing wrong, and in
answering the three questions above.  If you're going to post to the net,
please could you also send me a copy via e-mail.  Thanks.


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Phillip MacQueen,			ARPA:  pjm at astro.as.utexas.edu
The University of Texas as Austin,	Voice: (512) 471-1470
McDonald Observatory, RLM 15-308,
Austin, Texas  78712, U.S.A.
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