Where are flex libraries located?

Question

I find myself with a very weird problem in my hands. I wanted to install both flex (the fast lexical analyzer) and bison, and that's why I ran:

sudo apt-get install bison flex

The installation goes on without errors and, as a matter of fact, if I type

dpkg -L flex

I end up with a list of entries which includes

/usr/lib

And, in that path, I expect to find the flex libraries (which as far as I know are libfl.a or libfl.so, depending if the installation was shared or static), but, lo and behold, there's no libfl library under /usr/lib, and using

find -L 'libfl.a' (or 'libfl.so')

returns only

No such file or directory

I'm completely puzzled...where should flex libraries be located?

Thanks

Answer 1

The files are in the libfl-dev package, which is a dependency of flex. The package is Multi-Arch enabled, so the files are under the /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ or /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ directory, depending on whether you are on 32 or 64 bit. Or possibly under /usr/lib/armhf-linux-gnu/ if you are on ARM.