man is the command for viewing manual pages, which are an old, pre-html format for help documents. Try this:
man man
That gives you the man page for the command 'man'. In it you'll find a discussion of how the man command knows where to find man pages. Yours may be different than mine (I have Solaris and Mac OS X available to me, but not linux), but there should be a mention of MANPATH. Mine has a section called SEARCH PATH FOR MANUAL PAGES.
Anyway, MANPATH is an environment variable. You can see all the environment variables you have set by typing 'env' at a shell prompt. Or, to view just the MANPATH environment variable, type 'echo $MANPATH'. If it is set (for you it apparently isn't) it looks something like this:
That's just a list of directories separated by colons. The whole point of what I suggested doing was looking in all those directories for a file (i.e. a man page) that contains the word 'vorbis'.
Since you don't have a MANPAGE environment variable, man is finding the path in its configuration file. The manpage for man should tell you where that is. It's probably something like /usr/share/misc/man.conf. I could give you another incantation which extracts the path from there, but the 'apropos' command probably does the same thing. My only reservation there is that the installation of your encoding program might have copied the manpage for itself to your system without adding it to the manpage database, hence my suggestion to look the brute-force way. Of course it may not have a manpage at all.
However, since the whole point of this exercise was to find the encoding program, and you've done that another way, I think you are done with this branch. You can see if abcde installed a manpage like this:
no subject
man man
That gives you the man page for the command 'man'. In it you'll find a discussion of how the man command knows where to find man pages. Yours may be different than mine (I have Solaris and Mac OS X available to me, but not linux), but there should be a mention of MANPATH. Mine has a section called SEARCH PATH FOR MANUAL PAGES.
Anyway, MANPATH is an environment variable. You can see all the environment variables you have set by typing 'env' at a shell prompt. Or, to view just the MANPATH environment variable, type 'echo $MANPATH'. If it is set (for you it apparently isn't) it looks something like this:
/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/man:/opt/solaris/man:/usr/X11R6/man
That's just a list of directories separated by colons. The whole point of what I suggested doing was looking in all those directories for a file (i.e. a man page) that contains the word 'vorbis'.
Since you don't have a MANPAGE environment variable, man is finding the path in its configuration file. The manpage for man should tell you where that is. It's probably something like /usr/share/misc/man.conf. I could give you another incantation which extracts the path from there, but the 'apropos' command probably does the same thing. My only reservation there is that the installation of your encoding program might have copied the manpage for itself to your system without adding it to the manpage database, hence my suggestion to look the brute-force way. Of course it may not have a manpage at all.
However, since the whole point of this exercise was to find the encoding program, and you've done that another way, I think you are done with this branch. You can see if abcde installed a manpage like this:
man abcde
Amy