Linux Filesystem; MP3 to OGG

[nemorathwald]

I'm copying my MP3 collection from my Windows computer to my Linux computer. I'd like to have it all in OGG Vorbis format. For a while I had a program on Windows that changed them from one to the other, but it was shareware and expired. I tried installing a free open source program on Linux to do this but it's one of those programs that doesn't appear in the Applications menu. So it's apparently intended for use from the command line.

Of course that would involve finding the executable in the filesystem first, I guess. In a command line interface you are walking through a subterranean network of perfectly dark tunnels. Instead of a flashlight or lantern, you are provided with an infinite supply of camera flashbulbs called the ls command. I prefer searching the filesystem through the graphical browser. I figure at least I can find the darn executable, then I can go into the shell and start up the program.

I have been informed that programs are found in the usr/bin directory, but all the executables there are named cryptically. As I go through clicking every one, nine tenths of them do nothing. Anyway, let me know any advice you might have, from any approach you desire.

Comments

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

matt@p4:~$ /bin/ksh
bash: /bin/ksh: No such file or directory
matt@p4:~$ su /bin/ksh
Unknown id: /bin/ksh

[natashasikorsky.livejournal.com]

It should work from bash, which is apparently your default shell. Forget the ksh parts. I suspect, though, that the next problem you're going to run into is you don't have a MANPATH defined. You can check that with

echo $MANPATH

and if it displays nothing then your man path is determined by a configuration file. There's a way to make that work, too, but...

Someone below mentioned the command apropos, which I believe does the same thing, only simpler. Try this...

apropos vorbis

Apropos tends to spit out a lot of really nastily formatted stuff, so it may not be simpler afterall, but what it will likely display for apropos vorbis is "vorbis: nothing appropriate".

Amy

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

"Man" stands for manual, right? echo $MANPATH displays nothing, so the man path is determined by a configuration file. Is a man path the place where I can expect installtions to place manuals? apropos vorbis does result in "vorbis: nothing appropriate".

[natashasikorsky.livejournal.com]

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:

/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