mat2(1)

💖 mat2 — the metadata anonymisation toolkit 2 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to the manual page for mat2, the metadata anonymisation toolkit 2 🎀 (yes it's a User Command, yes it's iconic, we love her)

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

mat2 [-h] [-v] [-l] [-V] [-s | -L] [files [files ...]]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

no cap, mat2 removes metadata from various fileformats. She supports a wide variety of file formats — audio, office, images, … literally the whole roster 💅

careful bestie!! mat2 does not clean files in-place. Instead, it will produce a file with the word cleaned between the filename and its extension. So for a file named filename.png, you get filename.cleaned.png. 🫶 The original stays untouched, periodt.

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🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

🧚 positional arguments:

• files — the files to process ✨ (yes plural, you can feed her many)

👑 optional arguments:

• -h, --help — show this help message and exit 💖
• -v, --version — show program's version number and exit 🎀
• -l, --list — list all supported fileformats 🌈
• --check-dependencies — check if mat2 has all the dependencies it needs 🔍 (vibe check on her whole setup, fr)
• -V, --verbose — show more verbose status information 🗣️ (she will yap, and honestly? we listen)
• --unknown-members policy — how to handle unknown members of archive-style files. policy should be one of: abort, omit, keep 💀
• -s, --show — list harmful metadata detectable by mat2 without removing them 👀 (a lil sneak peek before the glow-up)
• -L, --lightweight — remove SOME metadata ⚡ (note the caps, she means some)
• --inplace — clean in place, without backup 😭 no backup!! be so for real before you run this one!!

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⭐ EXAMPLES ⭐

To remove all the metadata from a PDF file:

mat2 ./myfile.pdf

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💜 NOTES ABOUT METADATA 💜

okay listen, while mat2 is doing its very best to display metadata when the --show flag is passed, it doesn't mean that a file is clean from any metadata if mat2 doesn't show any. There is no reliable way to detect every single possible metadata for complex file formats. 😔

This is why you shouldn't rely on metadata's presence to decide if your file must be cleaned or not. Fr fr.

Moreover, mat2 goes to great lengths to make sure that as much metadata as possible are removed. This might sometimes result in a loss of quality of the processed files. 🫠 For example, textual based pdf file converted into image based one means that it'll be no longer possible to select text in them. If you're experiencing this, you might want to give the lightweight cleaning mode a try — but keep in mind by doing so, some metadata won't be cleaned. 🎀

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💀 BUGS 💀

While mat2 does its very best to remove every single metadata, it's still in beta, and some might remain. 🙈 Should you encounter some issues, check the bugtracker: https://github.com/jvoisin/mat2/issues

Please use accordingly and be careful. 🫶

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🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

This software was made by Julien (jvoisin) Voisin with the support of the Tails project. 👑

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🌈 COPYRIGHT 🌈

This software is released on LGPLv3. ⚖️ slay

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• exiftool(1p)
• pdf-redact-tools(1)

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and that's the whole page bestie!! this was mat2 version 0.14.0, dated October 2025 — go clean your files, protect your privacy, and stay iconic 💖✨🎀🦋🌸💅🫶