flex is a programmer's tool for generating lexical analyzers (programs that perform pattern-matching on input text.) Here's the first paragrpah of the man page:
flex-2.5.4a: description + notes
flex is a tool for generating scanners: programs which recognized lexical patterns in text. flex reads the given input files, or its standard input if no file names are given, for a description of a scanner to generate. The description is in the form of pairs of regular expressions and C code, called rules. flex generates as output a C source file, lex.yy.c, which defines a routine yylex(). This file is compiled and linked with the -lfl library to produce an executable. When the executable is run, it analyzes its input for occurrences of the regular expressions. Whenever it finds one, it executes the corresponding C code.flex is intended as a replacement for the traditional Unix lex it generates faster smaller scanners and has many enhancements over lex.
The
libfl.a
included in this distribution is ann32
static library(usr/freeware/lib32/libfl.a).
If you need theo32
equivalent, or a shared library, you may build them from the included source.
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