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Can someone tell me how I can install flex (lexical analyzer) on my Mac? I searched everywhere on google and I can't find it. I have the universal binary and I extracted it to my desktop but I have no idea where to go from here. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Brian Tompsett - 汤莱恩
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user635064
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5 Answers5

18

Try using Homebrew (Packet manager for Mac) and use the following command :-

brew install flex
Pawandeep Singh
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5

You can use macports to install flex

ennuikiller
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4

You can always install from source. Download the tarball from the flex site, extract it, cd to the directory where you extracted it, and run the following:

./configure
make
make install
make clean

Assuming you have make and a C compiler on your Mac, which I believe all Macs have.

rici
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Rafe Kettler
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  • Hey, i just did that there was bunch of text in terminal and i didn't see any errors. After that, I typed flex and path to the .lex file and nothing happened. Can you please tell me how I can use it? I searched on google and did exactly what i found. Thanks – user635064 Mar 07 '11 at 04:44
  • @RafeKettler I've been trying to do exactly the same steps, but the `make` command keep erring out saying `Undefined symbols for architecture x86_64: "_yylex"`. Any idea what to try to fix this? – Vladimir Mar 31 '15 at 21:56
  • @Wongzigii I fixed that somehow. I'll try to remember how today, but no promises. I think, if I recall correctly I either didn't have one of my files `#include`'d correctly, or I was using an `extern` without defining it in the right place. But I get back to you if I remember the exact fix. – Vladimir May 29 '15 at 14:04
3

Flex is shipped with the xCode Command line tools; you only got to install them via xcode > preferences > downloads > Command line tools. This also includes gcc (Clang).

Jonathan Leffler
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Juan Antonio Orozco
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0

This info can help to somebody to save time:

Just today I have try to install FLEX 2.5.39 from sources. Make - fails.

After some thoughts I have decide to try older archives. 2.5.38 - fail 2.5.37 - OK

It seems on now() = 2015-03-15, macport also uses 2.5.37 build.

Ruslan Zasukhin
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