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These instructions explain how to use VLFeat from the command line (shell).

Download and unpack the latest VLFeat binary distribution in a directory of your choice (e.g. `~/src/vlfeat`). Let `VLFEATROOT` denote this directory.

The command line tools are located in `VLFEATROOT/bin/ARCH`. Here `ARCH` denotes the subdirectory relative to your architecture (e.g. `mac` for Mac OS X PPC, `maci` for Mac OS X Intel, `glnx86` for Linux, and so on). For the sake of illustration, the following table gives the path to the SIFT feature extraction program for the varius architectures:

Platform | `ARCH` | Path to command
--- | --- | ---
Windows 32 | `win32` | `VLFEATROOT\bin\w32\sift.exe`
Windows 64 | `win64` | `VLFEATROOT\bin\w64\sift.exe`
Mac Intel 32 | `maci` | `VLFEATROOT/bin/maci/sift`
Mac Intel 64 | `maci64` | `VLFEATROOT/bin/maci64/sift`
Linux 32 | `glnx86` | `VLFEATROOT/bin/glnx86/sift`
Linux 64 | `glnxa64` | `VLFEATROOT/bin/glnxa64/sift`

All commands have a corresponding man page found in `VLFEATROOT/src`. For UNIX based systems, the man pages can be viewed with the `man` utility. For instance

> man VLFEATROOT/src/sift.1

It might be convenient to add VLFeat to the system search paths. In Linux and Mac OS X this involves modifying the `PATH` and `MANPATH` environment variables. The exact details may vary, but it should be enough to add the following to your `~/.bash_profile`:

export PATH=VLFEATROOT/bin/ARCH:$PATH export MANPATH=VLFEATROOT/src:$MANPATH

Alternatively, you can copy the executables and man pages to appropriate system-wide directories.