thanks, I'll take care of that and provide a way for linking against a system-supplied pcre package in the next version of dbg-cli

It turns out that the problem is libtool. It wants to link in a shared object (libpcre.so) in preference to a old archive (libpcre.a) is ahead in the search path. So, you end up compiling with headers in the db-cli distribution but linking against an installed shared library, which, not surprisingly, leads to disaster.

I don't know if that behaviour of libtool is correct, but the simplest solution is to link against ../pcre/libpcre.a instead of -lpcre.

Of course, the ability to use ready installed pcre would make sense as well.