Install pcre with Homebrew, apk, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, apt, scoop

Project links

• Homepage
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• pcre-config
• pcregrep
• pcretest

Project history

Philip Hazel wrote PCRE at the University of Cambridge as a C implementation of regular-expression matching broadly compatible with Perl syntax and semantics.

The original series expanded from an 8-bit library to optional 16-bit support in release 8.30 and 32-bit support in 8.32. A redesigned API appeared as PCRE2 10.00 in January 2015.

PCRE1 concluded with release 8.45. The official documentation now describes it as obsolete and unmaintained while retaining its manuals for existing applications.

Adoption history

PCRE became a widely packaged compatibility layer for Perl-style regular expressions in C and in software embedding a C regex engine. The supplied metadata records availability across Homebrew, Alpine, Arch, Nix, MacPorts, Scoop, and Ubuntu ecosystems.

The original API remains relevant for legacy consumers, but the official documentation marks PCRE1 end-of-life and advises new projects to use PCRE2.

How it is used

Developers link libpcre, libpcre16, or libpcre32 to compile and match Perl-style patterns from C or through language bindings. The legacy distribution also offers a restricted POSIX wrapper and a C++ wrapper.

pcregrep applies PCRE matching from the command line, pcretest exercises patterns and library behavior, and pcre-config reports build and linkage settings.

PCRE has no documented per-user credentials or runtime configuration file; its feature set is principally selected at build time and queried programmatically or with pcre-config.

Why package nerds care

PCRE helped make Perl-like regex syntax available outside the Perl runtime through a small, embeddable C library. Package maintainers care about the distinction between the ABI-incompatible PCRE1 and PCRE2 families because migration requires source changes rather than a simple library replacement.

The package also supplies pcregrep, pcretest, and pcre-config, making it both a development dependency and a useful command-line regex toolkit.

Timeline

• 1997: Copyright and authorship notices identify the beginning of Philip Hazel's PCRE work.
• 8.30: PCRE added an optional 16-bit library.
• 8.32: PCRE added an optional 32-bit library.
• 2015-01-05: PCRE2 10.00 introduced the redesigned successor API.
• 2021: PCRE1 8.45 became the final original-series release.

Related projects

• PCRE2 is the actively maintained successor with a redesigned, incompatible API.
• Perl 5 provides the syntax and semantics that originally inspired PCRE.
• The PCRE distribution includes POSIX-compatible wrapper functions and the pcregrep and pcretest tools.

Sources

• Official PCRE homepage: https://www.pcre.org/
• Official PCRE1 documentation index: https://www.pcre.org/original/doc/html/index.html
• Official PCRE1 specification: https://www.pcre.org/original/doc/html/pcre.html
• Official PCRE2 NEWS: https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2/blob/main/NEWS
• Official PCRE2 README: https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2/blob/main/README
• source_facts.package-manager