GIFTEXT(1)

📦 version 6.1.3, in alpine 3.22, alpine 3.23, alpine 3.24, arch rolling, debian bookworm, debian trixie, fedora 43, fedora 44, nixpkgs unstable, opensuse-leap 16.0, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 giftext — the manual page, but make it make sense 💖

okay bestie, so this is giftext, part of the GIFLIB fam, and it's a section 1 manual page (that's user commands, iykyk). it's the tool that just... dumps everything about a GIF file as plain text. pixels, metadata, the whole vibe. no cap.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

giftext [-v] [-c] [-e] [-z] [-p] [-r] [-h] [gif-file]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so basically it's a program that dumps (text only, periodt) the general info about a GIF file. that's the whole gig. it's giving "show me everything."

and if you don't hand it a GIF file? no worries bestie, giftext will just try to read a GIF file from stdin. it's flexible like that 💅

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • -v — verbose mode!! (show progress). this turns on the printout of running scan lines, so you can literally watch it do the thing 👀
  • -c — dumps the color maps. the ~aesthetic~ of your GIF, decoded.
  • -e — dumps the encoded bytes — that's the pixels after being compressed with the LZ algorithm and chained together to form bytes. this is literally the exact form the data is saved in inside the GIF file. dumped in hex — 2 digits per byte.
  • -z — dumps the LZ codes of the image. also in hex — 3 digits per code (because we're limited to 12 bits, okurrr).
  • -p — dumps the pixels of the image. yep, hex again — 2 digits per pixel (<=byte).
  • -r — dumps raw pixels as one byte per pixel. ⚠️ heads up bestie: this option inhibits all other options and only the pixels get dumped. this one's the glow-up option — you can use it to convert GIF files into raw data. 📝 note: the color map can be extracted by the gifclrmp utility instead. and if more than one image is included in the file, all images will be dumped in order. no skipping, no favorites.
  • -h — prints one line of command line help, similar to the Usage above. a lil snack of guidance 🍓

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Gershon Elber. (the icon, the moment, the main character of this manpage 💜)

okay that's the whole page, you're welcome 🫶 this was GIFLIB Documentation, from way back on 2 May 2012, and the manual itself is GIFTEXT(1). go dump some pixels, bestie ✨🌈

📦 where this page comes from