Converting files - why linux is so wonderful

I'm a linux user for 5 or 6 six years now and want to give you some glimpses on how wonderful environment it can be for daily tinkering. 

Sometimes I have to change format of some file or files. This is the moment when the power of linux can be unleashed.


There are plenty of free and commercial programs to do the conversion on Windows and you don't know which one to choose, which one can do the stuff you want for free, which is easy to use or has a good tutorial. Plenty of things to think about, but all you need to do just convert something now and the program won't be used for a very long time.
However working on linux is much easier at least in this aspect. Chance that you already have a script or program that will do what you want is huge. Most of them is named in natural convention: ps2pdf - for converting PostScript files to PDF.
If you want a manual for it, you just have to type man ps2pdf and everything will be printed in the terminal. If something is not already available, quick query in the wiki of your distribution or in the forum and you'll get complete solution in 90% of cases.
Today I had this kind of problem. I wanted to print some scanned pictures of my friend's notes, but there were 200 pages in 200 files - person who scanned them was not very crafty. Anyway, in two minutes I found the solution - little script.

# This step is only needed when the images are in png format
# you would need to do the same with jpg's
for i in *.png ; do
if [ -f "$i" ]
then
convert +compress "$i" "`basename "$i" .png`.tif"
fi
done
########
tiffcp *.tif "Images.tif" # joins all file in one
tiff2pdf -z "Images.tif" -o "Images.pdf" # converts file into pdf
rm "Images.tif" # removes old files

Using that within 5 seconds I got very handy pdf with every picture in right order.