flex is a tool for generating scanners: programs which
recognized lexical patterns in text. flex reads the given input
files, or its standard input if no file names are given, for a
description of a scanner to generate. The description is in the form of
pairs of regular expressions and C code, called rules. flex
generates as output a C source file, `lex.yy.c' (`lexyy.c' on
MS-DOS), which defines a routine `yylex()'. This file is compiled
and linked with the `-lfl' library to produce an executable. When
the executable is run, it analyzes its input for occurrences of the
regular expressions. Whenever it finds one, it executes the
corresponding C code.
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