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Re: flex and dos source files. How is flex built for cygwin

Peter Rehley schrieb:
Peter Rehley wrote:
Larry Hall wrote:
We have a customer that is using flex under a custom version of cygwin that we provided them (with source). The customer is having problems when their "*.l" files are in dos format. Flex is taking the lines from the file and adding them into the lex.yy.c file untouched. (i.e. they still have the \n\r at the end), and this causing problems later on.

I tried using the version of flex that comes with the latest version of cygwin (1.5.12) and flex changes the \n\r to just \n, which makes everything work fine. Good I thought since the version of flex we provide is not the latest. I'll just recompile.

But when I tried that with the latest flex (2.5.4a-3) I get the same behavior that the customer is seeing. I get this behavior even if I compile on the latest version of cygwin.

So, my question is what options are used for building flex?

there's no build script and an inactive maintainer. we don't know. hopefully just the standard options.
./configure --prefix=/usr sharedstatedir=/var --mandir=/usr/share/man
make && make install

Linking against /usr/lib/binmode.o perhaps?

He meant that by accident flex was linked against binmode.o, which is wrong. It was no advice to reproduce that error with linking against binmode or textmount.

Tried on cygwin 1.5.12
make clean
make LDFLAGS="/usr/lib/binmode.o",

make clean
make LDFLAGS="-lbinmode"

but neither helped

for sure not.

However linking the /usr/lib/textmode.o did work
make LDFLAGS="/usr/lib/textmode.o" # <- did the job

Thanks Larry for pointing me in the right directory :)

Oh god. This was the right direction? Sorry no.

If you open your flex input file in a *textmode mount* \r\n will get converted, if you open that in a binmode mount it will not get converted.
$ man mount

So it's entirely a user problem behind the keyboard, and does NOT need a changed linker line. Just tell the user to set this mount to textmode, so that his DOSEOL will get converted. Or convert the DOSEOL by basic commands like unix2dos.

But if you force linking against binmode or textmode, your flex binary will do no conversions at all, and will only work on the matching mount modes.

This is a pretty basic cygwin FAQ, and I wonder why this needs such a long and wrong consideration.
Reini Urban

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