I've been looking for tasks to put my linux machine to work, and i think i have found one. I downloaded about 1000 png icon files that i would like to use on my windows machine (i still need to use windows, i'm not proficient enough with Debian to switch yet).

These files need to be converted to ISO before windows will use them as icons, so i downloaded something called imagemagick. its description said that it would convert batches of ICO to PNG and vice versa.

thats all well and good, but i cant even run the program. (#imagemagick --help command not found) I have an install of debian without a desktop. just command line. i think imagemagick is supposed to be run from a desktop interface.


1) how do i find out if i can run it from a command line?

2) if i cannot, what other applications out there will do batch conversions from PNG to ICO?

Again, im new at this, so be gentile.

thanks,

By the looks of it, you're trying to run as root. Use your normal user account for this. How did you install it and what commands are you trying to use for the processing?

imagemagick can be run from the command line according to their own description.
The dependencies do not include any references to X. So you should be ok running it off the command line.
To install it just type from the command line.
Cheers,
jdk

Imagemagick is not a program in itself, it's a set of programs. The two big ones are "display" and "convert". What you want to use is convert. The basic command should be:

convert image.png image.ico

It will automatically create the new image based on the suffix you put on the output file.

They have good online documentation here.

Thanks everyone for your input.

after reading your posts i quickly felt like a fool... the convert command is very simple to use.

it seems that MOGRIFY was the command i was after... it blew through 1000 files in under a minute.

i have one follow up question.

Aside from checking the ImageMagick website, how exact would i have known that ImageMagick was not a program itself, but a collection of commands? In your answers you seem to know this fact as if it were obvious. do i just need more screen time?

Thanks for your help guys

Did you read my first posting?
I generated that description by typing at the command line.
cheers,
jdk

You can also do a search of installed man pages with "man -k keyword" (also usually aliased to "apropos"). It will show you all installed man pages related to the keyword. On my system "man -k imagemagick" (or "apropos imagemagick") lists the actual man page as "ImageMagick". Remember that Linux is case-sensitive.

Ans 1) Check the documentation for the software online. It will tell you whether/not they support "command line" execution.

Ans 2) I think Picasa2 should do the trick too.