Name

cw-solver.sh

Language

bash (Bourne shell)

Licence

Public Domain, despite the GPL licence appearing in some versions of the code.

What does it do?

You can give it an argument consisting of letters interspaced with periods which it will use to search through a word list to find a word that matches this pattern. The periods correspond to unknown letters in the word. For example, if you use the pattern we.com., it will find the word welcome.

Bugs

  1. The sanity check for the inputted pattern doesn't work well. It only checks to see if a letter-and-period pattern exists somewhere, not that the whole phrase follows this pattern. It only uses that found pattern as the pattern to look for.
  2. Proper nouns are included in the results at the moment. That's because some of the clues may be proper nouns, which are marked in the particular word list by a initial capital letter. You may or may not want this. If not, filter out the results starting with a capital.

Comments

Ripped shamelessly from the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, revision 10, example 16-18.

Because in the Bash-scripting guide this code was public domain, this program is too, despite the GPL coming in the head of the code.

I find this useful because for the same reason as the anagram program, I don't usually buy newspapers on consecutive days, so if I do the crossword in it, I usually don't see the next day's paper for the solution.

This program depends on having a word list installed, achieved by installing one or more w{lang} files and then selecting your preferred one with sudo select-default-wordlist.

Version 1.4

#!/bin/bash # # Crossword solver. # Copyright (C) 2018 Stewart Park <phoheo at gmail> # # This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify # it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by # the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or # (at your option) any later version. # # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the # GNU General Public License for more details. # # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License # along with this program. If not, see <http:www.gnu.org/licenses/>. # # Taken from the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, revision 10, example 16-18 E_NOPATT=71 usage() { echo echo "$0 \"pattern,\"" echo "where \"pattern\" is in the form" echo "xxx..x.x..." echo echo "The x's represent known letters," echo "and the periods are unknown letters (blanks)." echo "Letters and periods can be in any position." echo "For example, try: sh cw-solver.sh w...i....n" echo } for opt in "$@"; do case $opt in -h|--help) usage; exit 0;; *) ;; esac done if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then usage exit $E_NOPATT; fi ############### DICT=/usr/share/dict/words # ^^^^^ # Looks for word list here. # # To adjust this word list, install a 'w{lang}' file and # select it using 'sudo select-default-wordlist'. # TODO: Do we want to have proper nouns in the results? # Confirm what the user has entered is acceptable if [[ $1 =~ [[:alpha:]\.]+ ]]; then PATTERN="^$1$" PATTERN=${PATTERN//./[[:alpha:]]} grep "$PATTERN" "$DICT"; else echo echo "The pattern '$1' is not recognised, aborting ..." echo exit $E_NOPATT; fi echo exit $? # Script terminates here. # Fin