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Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!seismo!cmcl2!kaplan
From: kaplan@cmcl2.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.4bsd,comp.text
Subject: bug in spell
Message-ID: <13292@cmcl2.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 3-Mar-87 16:40:46 EST
Article-I.D.: cmcl2.13292
Posted: Tue Mar  3 16:40:46 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Mar-87 23:43:06 EST
Organization: New York University
Lines: 26
Keywords: spell spellin aniversery
Xref: utgpu comp.bugs.4bsd:198 comp.text:486

Here's a good one.  It really makes you lose confidence in UNIX text processing
tools, especially 'spell'.  Try the following:

prompt > spell -v
aniversery
^D
prompt >

(Don't type 'prompt >', that's your prompt.)
spell does not flag the word as being misspelled.  I tried this on various
vanilla (direct from the factory ) systems and none thought that the word was
misspelled.  the -x option says that the root is the whole word and spellout
says that the word IS in the hlist.  However, when I made a new hlist directly
from a words file that did not have the word,  it still seemed to appear in the
hlist!  This would lend me to believe that the bug is in spellin.  Anyone
who can show me why this is not wrong or explain it better, please send me
mail (I do not subscribe to this newsgroup) and I will summarize to the net
if necessary.

Laurence S. Kaplan
NYU Ultracomputer Research Project
715 Broadway  Rm. 1005
New York, NY  10003
(212) 460-7327
arpa:	kaplan@cmcl2
uucp:	{ihnp4,seismo}!cmcl2!kaplan