Shell install

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, glx for Linux, and so on). For instance, to run the SIFT feature extraction code type

Platform ARCH Command to type
Windows 32 w32 VLFEATROOT\bin\w32\sift.exe
Windows 64 w64 VLFEATROOT\bin\w64\sift.exe
Mac Intel maci VLFEATROOT/bin/maci/sift
Mac PPC mac VLFEATROOT/bin/mac/sift
Linux 32 glx VLFEATROOT/bin/glx/sift
Linux 64 a64 VLFEATROOT/bin/a64/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.