I am fustrated with environment variables they never seem to work for me.
Im most likely invoking them wrongly. (running Suse 9.0)


For example I compiled and installed lame (mp3 encoder/decoder) the libmp3lame.so.0 installed in the usr/local/lib directory. This shared library is significant because im trying to install avidemux-2.0.28-Suse9.0KDE3.1.4.i686.rpm this package complains about not finding this libmp3lame.so file. so I now run

cd /lame-3.96
make uninstall
make clean
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
ldconfig (im not sure about how to use ldconfig and the man pages for it were more confusing)

I then compiled and install the lame source code and I verified that the program installed and by default the libmp3lame.so.0 is found in the /usr/local/lib ( I was also able to see it there)

however when i tried to install rpm -ivh avidemu-xxxxxx it still complains about the libmp3lame.so.0

although the environment variable set in to the right directory
echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH


now i know i can probably simple fix this problem with a simple link of the libmp3lame.so file to the directory avidemux is looking for. But i want to know why that I can never get Environment variables to work in Bash terminal. I have the same problem with some other environment variables like PK_CONFIG_PATH

opp i should have posted this in newbie section *************