Search commands such as the UNIX grep or equivalent commands for finding strings that one sees in Web browsers or text-formatting systems. These systems use a regular-expression-like notation for describing patterns that the user wants to find in a file. Different search systems convert the regular expression into either a DFA or an NFA, and simulate that automaton on the file being searched.
Lexical-analyzer generators, such as Lex or Flex. Recall that a lexical analyzer is the component of a compiler that breaks the source program into logical units (called tokens) of one or more characters that have a shared significance. Examples of tokens include keywords (e.g., while),identifiers (e.g., any letter followed by zero or more letters and/or digits),and Sig,TIS,such as + or <=. A lexical-analyzer generator accepts descriptions of the forms of tokens, which are essentially regular expressions, andproduces a DFA that recognizes which token appears next on the input.
