The Flex package contains a utility for generating programs that recognize patterns in text.
Approximate build time: 0.1 SBU Required disk space: 3.4 MB |
Official download location for Flex (2.5.4a):
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/non-gnu/flex/
For its installation Flex depends on: Bash, Binutils, Bison, Coreutils, Diffutils, GCC, Gettext, Glibc, Grep, M4, Make, Sed.
Prepare Flex for compilation:
./configure --prefix=/usr |
Compile the package:
make |
This package has a test suite available which can perform a number of checks to ensure it built correctly. Should you choose to run it, the following command will do so:
make bigcheck |
And install the package:
make install |
There are some packages that expect to find the Lex library in /usr/lib. Create a symlink to account for this:
ln -s libfl.a /usr/lib/libl.a |
A few programs don't know about flex yet and try to run its predecessor lex. To support those programs, create a shell script named lex that calls flex in Lex emulation mode:
cat > /usr/bin/lex << "EOF" #!/bin/sh # Begin /usr/bin/lex exec /usr/bin/flex -l "$@" # End /usr/bin/lex EOF chmod 755 /usr/bin/lex |
flex is a tool for generating programs that recognize patterns in text. Pattern recognition is useful in many applications. From a set of rules on what to look for flex makes a program that looks for those patterns. The reason to use flex is that it is much easier to specify the rules for than to write the actual pattern-finding program.
flex++ invokes a version of flex that is used exclusively for C++ scanners.
libfl.a is the flex library.