SPELLINTIAN(1)

📦
version 2.139.0ubuntu2 · 11 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

✨ SPELLINTIAN ✨

okay bestie, welcome to spellintian(1) — the cute lil' spellchecker from the Debian Package Checker family 💅

🌸 NAME 🌸

spellintian — a simple spellchecker built on top of Lintian's own data files 🦋

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

spellintian [--picky] [text-file...]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so basically, the spellintian command goes through one or more text files and hunts down spelling mistakes 🔍✨ It uses the exact same spellcheck algorithm and data set that lintian uses, so like, it's the same brain, just a smaller vibe.

And if you don't hand it any file on the command line? It just chills and waits for its input on stdin, no big deal 🫶

👑 OPTIONS 👑

  • --picky — turns on the extra "picky" data set on top of the regular spelling data set. And babes, the "picky" set is a lot — it's stuffed with capitalization-related rules (like, you gotta spell "Debian" with an uppercase "D" or else 💀).
⚠️ careful though: these checks can produce false positives. The iconic example? Think about the two different uses of Python — "the python binary" (like /usr/bin/python) versus "the Python language". The --picky option will unconditionally flag the python in the first case as bad, even though it's literally correct. it's giving overzealous 😭
  • -h, --help — shows you the usage info and dips out. that's it, that's the whole thing ✨
  • --version — prints a version banner and exits. slay, we love a quick flex 🌈

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

💜 AUTHORS 💜

  • Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> (wrote the manpage) 📝
  • Jakub Wilk <jwilk@jwilk.net> (wrote the program) ⌨️

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this was Lintian v2.139.0ubuntu2, dated 2026-10-08 — drink some water, spell "Debian" with a capital D, and go check your text files 💖✨🎀

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