Spellcheck file names?

[MacProRumours]

SPELL-check a whole volume?

Has anyone found a need to check the spellings of file-names: over a whole volume?

If so, any ideas how they might be spell-checked in one go, in a similar way as checking a single textual file?

Ideally, also for any Comments.

I'm sure that some, if not many, of my file names have incorrect spellings.

 

[Slartibart]

if you just want to spellcheck: you can easily write out all names of files (or e.g. only the names of files of a certain type) from a folder or volume to a text file and spellcheck there.

Can you elaborate what kind of orthographic errors you are referring to?
I for example do not use file or folder names with spaces, but I tend to use something like longer, descriptive, composited names or even phrases -> "Meanwhile_in_some_ other_place", "BioIng-BachelorStudents-ExamenQuestion_1.Trimester.tex" et cetera. To spellcheck these a bit more scripting is required.

 

[frou]

If you're at all familiar with programming, it's probably possible to do this as a shell-script one-liner in Terminal.

Take some inspiration from this wonder 80's video 😀 and probably starting with the find command.

 

[f54da]

Do you really need it over the entire volume? That's going to bring up a lot of false positives. Most likely you only need it in documents/desktop/downloads/etc. As frou mentioned using find + grep against /usr/dict after removing extension might work.

But I'm a simple person and the clearer solution for me would be to wrap the matching part in a python script (you can keep the entire dict in memory and easily to preprocessing such as splitting by underscore, etc.) Tbh this is the kind of glue task chatGPT should do well at.

 

[MacProRumours]

Do you really need it over the entire volume? That's going to bring up a lot of false positives. Most likely you only need it in documents/desktop/downloads/etc. As frou mentioned using find + grep against /usr/dict after removing extension might work.

But I'm a simple person and the clearer solution for me would be to wrap the matching part in a python script (you can keep the entire dict in memory and easily to preprocessing such as splitting by underscore, etc.) Tbh this is the kind of glue task chatGPT should do well at.

You're right, it would only be needed for the 3Ds: Documents, Desktop and Downloads.

As it's a bit beyond me, I had wondered if someone else had come up with a script or a set of terminal commands to accomplish this. Or, if some unknown utility programme had such a facility built-in.

The object would be, in later a Find operation in the Finder, to avoid missing things that some time ago were misspelt due to typos, hurried key-boarding etc.

 

[Slartibart]

The object would be, in later a Find operation in the Finder, to avoid missing things that some time ago were misspelt due to typos, hurried key-boarding etc.

One way to include and find such files is using wild cards in »Raw Queries« via the advanced search in Spotlight. Here is a short video vignette which explains this (starts around 3:26).
A little bit more info in this answer on stackexchange.
Combined with the other search options in Spotlight and the ability to save any search, the Finder covers probably all needs to "fuzzy"-find misspelled files. YMMV. 😎

nota bene: other options to do this are

• using mdfind (CLI to Spotlight)
• or the "classics" 🤓: find, grep & company.