Doe anybody have any resources for how to uninstall and re-install magic? I had some problems with my previous install and tried to remove it with "sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove magic" and also "sudo apt-get remove magic" but it didn't completely remove the folder, and now i am unable to install a fresh copy when I download magic from the github.

The packaged version is usually installed into /usr/lib/ or /usr/share/ or something like that, whereas the installed version is in /usr/local/lib/. Usually the PATH environment variable is set to prefer /usr/bin/ over /usr/local/bin/. The only things you should need to remove are /usr/bin/magic (the launch script) and the directory /usr/lib/magic (or where ever it was put), so that when you run "magic" from the command line, the one that is found is /usr/local/bin/magic, and it will only try to load shared object library files from /usr/local/lib/magic/.

Thanks for your help! I was able to get it to work after re-installing it.