%general-entities; ]> Flex Flex contains several known bugs. Fix these with the following patch: patch -Np1 -i ../&flex-fixes-patch; The GNU autotools detects that the Flex source code has been modified by the previous patch and tries to update the man page accordingly. This does not work correctly on many systems, and the default page is fine, so make sure it does not get regenerated: touch doc/flex.1 Prepare Flex for compilation: ./configure --prefix=/usr Compile the package: make To test the results, issue: make check. Install the package: make install There are some packages that expect to find the lex library in /usr/lib. Create a symlink to account for this: ln -s libfl.a /usr/lib/libl.a A few programs do not know about flex yet and try to run its predecessor, lex. To support those programs, create a wrapper script named lex that calls flex in lex emulation mode: cat > /usr/bin/lex << "EOF" #!/bin/sh # Begin /usr/bin/lex exec /usr/bin/flex -l "$@" # End /usr/bin/lex EOF chmod 755 /usr/bin/lex Installed programs Installed library flex and lex libfl.a Short Descriptions flex A tool for generating programs that recognize patterns in text; it allows for the versatility to specify the rules for pattern-finding, eradicating the need to develop a specialized program flex lex A script that runs flex in lex emulation mode lex libfl.a The flex library libfl.a