Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

How it works...

In grep, ^ is the word-start marker character and the $ character is the word-end marker. The -q option suppresses any output, making the grep command quiet.

Alternatively, we can use the spell–check, aspell, to check whether a word is in a dictionary or not:

#!/bin/bash  
#Filename: aspellcheck.sh 
word=$1  

output=`echo \"$word\" | aspell list`  

if [ -z $output ]; then  
        echo $word is a dictionary word;  
else  
        echo $word is not a dictionary word;  
fi  

The aspell list command returns output text when the given input is not a dictionary word, and does not output anything when the input is a dictionary word. A -z command checks whether $output is an empty string or not.

The look command will display lines that begin with a given string. ...