flex-2.5.4a: description + notes

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 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 an n32 static library (usr/freeware/lib32/libfl.a). If you need the o32 equivalent, or a shared library, you may build them from the included source.


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