spellin, one more time

[Jim Diamond]

I sent this question out a few weeks ago, and as is usual for
3130-type questions, the silence was overwhelming.

I realize that, officially speaking, SGI employees are not allowed to
acknowledge the existence of pre-4D series machines (this is one of
the reasons that we cancelled our 3130's Hotline support), much less
publically answer questions about them, but I assume that employees
with 3130 knowledge haven't all been terminated.  (Sorta reminds you
of "1984", doesn't it?)  Since none of the other 3130 users (i.e.,
orphans) out there were able or willing to answer the question, I
thought that if some kind soul at SGI knows the answer, I would be
happy to promise to never divulge who helped me out on this one.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

I would like to create my own hashed word list (analogous to hlista
and hlistb) for use with the spell(1) program on a 3130.  While the
man page for spell (and hashcheck and spellin and hashmake) does not
explicitly mention how to do this, it would seem that part of this
task involves something like
	cat <file> | hashmake | spellin <n>
where <n> should be the number of words in <file>.
But even attempting
	echo dog | hashmake | spellin 1
seems beyond spellin's capabilities: after sitting and thinking for
about 20 CPU seconds, it crashes with a segmentation violation.

Is there anyone out there who would admit to knowledge about how this
version of spellin should really work?

Thanks.

			Jim Diamond
			zsd at pig.drea.dnd.ca