Shelling out to Aspell: Linux gurus please

Hi folks There is a lot on the web suggesting that the PHP pspell functions are buggy. So I am trying to use aspell to check single words by shelling out of PHP using backticks via the bash shell on Linux. The problem is that this is a two stage process. First, you launch aspell with "aspell -a". Aspell then returns an identification message, and waits for a word to be supplied from standard input. For each misspelled word, it returns a delimited string of suggestions. But my *nix skills are limited and I can't figure out how to send the word in the second command using the backticked string. The aspell manual page for the -a option is here: http://aspell.net/aspell-man/6_Writing.html#SECTION00720000000000000000 Also, how to ensure that I don't create orphan aspell processes if for some reason the request is interrupted? I know that this is a bit OT and more of a Unix question that a PHP question, but I am under time pressure and any tips would be much appreciated. -- Geoff Caplan Advantae Ltd mailto:geoff@advantae.com http://www.advantae.com