Installing flex (lexical analyzer) on Mac

10
votes

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!

5
cmacosflex-lexerlexical-analysis
Where did you get the binary from? I can't find one on their site. - Rafe Kettler

5 Answers

4
votes

You can use macports to install flex

13
votes

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

brew install flex
4
votes

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.

3
votes

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).

0
votes

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.