Re: [Aspell-user] Bound to Port 80?

[Scott Gifford]

Daniel Watts <address@hidden> writes:

> Kevin Atkinson wrote:

[...]

>>> Why on earth would ispell (or aspell) bind to port 80?
>>
>> Aspell does not have any network code.  I assume the same is true
>> for ispell.  The only thing I can think of is that perhapses it is
>> not really "ispell" the spell checker.  Next time this happens
>> perhapses you should look figure out the exact binary that is being
>> called.
>>
> Ok thanks - just wanted to confirm that a/ispell should not really
> have any reason to bind to a network port (eg no automatic update of
> dictionaries from a remote server).

One possibility is that a program which runs inside your Web server
(like a PHP, mod_perl, or Java Web application) ran ispell, but
did not close the filehandle to the Web server's listen socket first,
and then ispell never exited.  I think that would cause the behavior
you're seeing.

If that's the case, the solution would be to fix the Web application
to either close unused filehandles before executing ispell (or set
flags on the listen filehandle so it is automatically closed on exec),
or modify ispell to close unused file descriptors when it starts
(which seems silly, but is not uncommon).

Or perhaps aspell doesn't have this behavior, and you could upgrade to
it.  :-)

----Scott.