10.15. Flex-2.6.4

The Flex package contains a utility for generating programs that recognize patterns in text.

10.15.1. Installation of Flex

Prepare Flex for compilation:

./configure \
 --prefix=/usr \
 --docdir=/usr/share/doc/flex-2.6.4

Compile the package:

make

To test the results, issue:

make check

The test suite will report 3 failures for tests that use bison, which is not installed yet. For full test coverage, you can run Flex's test suite again after Bison is installed.

Install the package:

make install

A few programs do not know about flex yet and try to run its predecessor, lex. To support those programs, create a symbolic link named lex that runs flex in lex emulation mode:

ln -sv flex /usr/bin/lex

10.15.2. Contents of Flex