flex

Minimalist GNU for Windows

Downloading and installing Flex

Flex is described here: http://www.gnu.org/software/flex/flex.html. The recommended binary distribution of Flex is available from the GnuWin32 project on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32/. Do not install Flex in the MSYS bin directory.

Building from source

Official flex development takes place on http://sourceforge.net/projects/flex Unfortunately, latest source distributives (1.5.33) use some multiprocess POSIX magic, which is not easily portable to win32. It is still possible to compile older versions of flex from CVS.

An example of "research" to build flex on MSYS/MinGW with 1.5.10 binaries can be found at http://rainforce.org/flex. There lies a whole research log (.notes), which badly needs a short excerpt to make it easily repeatable. In short you will need to:

• checkout flex sources from CVS with "-r flex-1-5-10" option (for example)
• get gettext, bison, libiconv from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mingw/
• run gettextize, autogen.sh, configure, make

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