Regina — Installing and Running

Versions. Regina is a mature, stable interpreter; minor releases rarely change behaviour for ordinary scripts. As of this writing, upstream is 3.9.7 while, for example, Ubuntu 24.04 ships 3.9.5. For almost all uses that difference is irrelevant; install from your package manager and move on. Only chase the upstream build (see the note at the end) if you specifically need a fix or feature from a newer release.

Installation

Install from the distribution's package manager. On Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives:

apt-get install -y regina-rexx

(The package is regina-rexx on Debian/Ubuntu; on Fedora/RHEL it is also regina-rexx via dnf, and on Alpine regina. Use whatever your distro calls it.)

Verify it installed:

regina -v        # → regina: REXX-Regina_3.9.5(MT) 5.00 25 Jun 2022 (64 bit)

Note regina -v prints to stdout (not stderr), so it is safe to capture in a pipeline.

Running programs

Invoke Regina through its own binaries, rexx or regina:

rexx script.rex [args...]

regina script.rex [args...]

Path note. Regina resolves a bare script name through its search path, not the current directory. If . is not on your PATH, regina hello.rex fails with Error 3.1: Program was not found. Give an explicit path instead: regina ./hello.rex.

Getting a newer version than your distro ships

If you truly need a build newer than the package manager offers, Regina's releases are on SourceForge under the regina-rexx project. Be aware this reintroduces the usual friction (picking the right platform package, SourceForge's download redirector serving an HTML page instead of the binary). Prefer the distro package unless you have a concrete reason not to.