Installing Flex-2.5.4a

Estimated build time:           0.1 SBU
Estimated required disk space:  3 MB

Contents of Flex

(Last checked against version 2.5.4a.)

The Flex package is used to generate programs which recognize patterns in text.

Flex installs the following:

Program Files

flex, flex++ (link to flex) and lex

Flex Installation Dependencies

(Last checked against version 2.5.4a.)

Bash: sh
Binutils: ar, as, ld, ranlib
Bison: bison
Coreutils: cat, chmod, cp, echo, hostname, install, ln, mv, rm, touch, tr
Diffutils: cmp
GCC: cc1, collect2, cpp0, gcc
Grep: egrep, grep
Make: make
Sed: sed

Installation of Flex

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