Flex is a tool for generating scanners: programs which recognized lexical patterns in text. it reads the given input files 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.

this package contains the static library for flex.