Re: Looking for Unix lex for modern systems

On Thursday, January 6, 2022 at 4:09:53 PM UTC-8, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> Can anyone point me at a version of Unix lex that will run on Linux?


On my Linux system, /usr/bin/lex is a symbolic link to /usr/bin/flex


On FreeBSD, they are both hard links to the same file.


On OS X, they are two different files (cmp -l shows differences)
of the same size.


A web search shows the Oracle lex man page for Solaris, which does not mention
flex, and so might not be a link of any kind.


I have hardware that can run SunOS and Solaris. (It should be easy to find
hardware to run Solaris-x86 versions.)


As to actual copyright AT&T lex, that might be a little harder.
[Flex can take the same input as lex but its internals are totally different.


Bell Labs long ago released the code to early Unix systems. The source
for lex is here:
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/lex or on
the 4.2BSD src archive at
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/4.2BSD/
I tried to compile the 4.2BSD version on FreeBSD and the errors were
ugly. -John]

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