GNU flex 2.5.2 Release Notes

Note:

Some of the links in this file point to online documents which require additional installation.

Table of Contents

What is GNU flex?

Support Policy

Installation Information

Silicon Graphics Legal Notice

Author's Notice(s)

Few GNU software Web pages:

GNU Software Online Documentation

GNU info tree at Ohio State University

Index of GNU resources at Yahoo

What is GNU flex ?

flex is the GNU replacement for the lex (lexical-analyzer generator). flex is POSIX compliant and generates much smaller and faster scanners than the standard Unix lex. There are two cases why you may be interested in flex.

1. You're compiling packages (probably downloaded from the net) which contain .l files. These packages may be language compilers/interpreters or other text processing tools.
2. You're writing your own text processing utility which needs to recognize some predefined regular-expression language.

See the man pages for further details.

Author's Notice(s):

Note that flex is distributed under a copyright very similar to that of BSD Unix, which is included with the sources, and not under the GNU General Public License (GPL), except for the "configure" script, which is covered by the GPL (GNU public license).

The GNU flex author is Vern Paxson.
Please send bug reports and feedback to: Vern Paxson (vern@ee.lbl.gov).

Builder Notice(s):

Built and packaged for SGI by Ariel Faigon.

This is free software. Emails for support silently ignored. Patches and constructive suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Installation Information

GNU flex subsystems

fw_GNUflex.sw.*

Execution only environment.
The flex executable and the libfl.a library.

fw_GNUflex.man.*

Man pages, release notes, and texinfo documentation.

fw_GNUflex.src.*

Full source distribution.

Installation Method

All of the subsystems for this product can be installed using IRIX. You do not need to use the miniroot. Refer to the Software Installation Administrator's Guide for complete installation instructions.

Compatibility

This software is compatible with IRIX 5.3 and IRIX 6.x.

NOTE: There's another version of flex in the 6.2 xpg4 sybsystem that comes as a patch for IRIX 6.2. That version of flex is almost identical to the freeware version. The differences are:

• The xpg4 version installs in /usr/bin/flex
• The xpg4 version is invoked indirectly from /usr/bin/lex
• The xpg4 version is older (based on 2.4.6 while this is 2.5.2)
• The xpg4 version was specifically tested against the X/OPEN XPG4 specifications. If strict XPG4 compliance is important to you you should use the xpg4 patch.

Fixed Bugs

libfl.a was missing in freeware_1.0. This is now fixed.