I have ispell installed on my Suse server with British English dictionaries. I want to remove the profanity from them - it's for young children.

I can download the 2.1MB englishxlg.hash file to my Mac, open it in textedit and spot the words, but when I simply cut them and replace the file on the server, I get 'wrong format' errors.

Looking at the man page for ispell, it seems I have to have a plain text word list which I then format as a hash file.

Can I edit > reformat the .hash file instead?

Is there a tool which I can use to edit the dictionary directly? E.g. adding/removing single/bulk words.

I've worked it out.

You cannot edit .hash files directly.

Instead,

1. Get a wordlist from somewhere - I found a British spelling wordlist text file from Google (one word per line).

2. Edit the list to your liking.

3. make copies of your existing .aff and .hash files.

4. run in the ispell dir: buildhash wordlist.txt current.aff current.hash

you'll see a bunch off nonsense scroll over the screen for a bit then when returned to the prompt, you're done.

I had an issue where I edited the wordlist.txt on a Mac in Textedit. When i transferred the file to the server, there were control-M's (^M) at the end of each line. I got rid of these with:

cat copy_of_wordlist.txt | col -b > wordlist.txt

So now, I can add/remove words from the system dictionary easily.