PAMVALIDATE(1)

💖 PAMVALIDATE(1) — the Pamvalidate User Manual, bestie edition 💖

okay so this is the manual page for pamvalidate, and it lives in section 1 of the Pamvalidate User Manual. pull up a chair, we're validating image formats and it's lowkey iconic ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

pamvalidate — validate Netpbm image format 💅

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

pamvalidate

that's it. no args. she's a solo act, no cap 🫶

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so this program is part of Netpbm(1), and here's the tea: pamvalidate copies a Netpbm image from Standard Input to Standard Output — except that if there are certain violations of the image format in the input, pamvalidate fails without producing any output. not even a crumb. nothing. 💀

this is most useful in a pipeline, right before a stage where you do not want to start working on Netpbm input until it knows it can get all the way through it. like bestie, imagine this: you're converting PPM images to PNG and you don't want to produce a partial PNG file under any circumstance. 🚫

if you just use pnmtopng, and the PPM input is truncated halfway through the raster, pnmtopng fails — but also produces about half of a PNG file. not the half-finished slay, just a mess 😭

to prevent that, pass your PPM input through pamvalidate on its way to pnmtopng. then pamvalidate will fail, and consequently the pipeline will fail, before pnmtopng has seen any input and therefore before pnmtopng has produced any output. gatekeeping the input like a true main character 👑

these are the kinds of format violations pamvalidate detects:

• a purported sample value exceeds the declared maxval.
• the stream ends prematurely.

this program works on multi-image streams, producing a corresponding output stream. so many images, so much validation, we love to see it 🌈

also: check out pamfix for a way to salvage an invalid Netpbm image stream. she's the rescue squad 🚑

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

there are no command line options defined specifically for pamvalidate, but it recognizes the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (see Common Options). so, no special toppings, just the standard menu 🍓

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🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

pam(1) pnm(1) pamfix(1)

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⭐ HISTORY ⭐

pamvalidate was new in Netpbm 10.66 (March 2014). a lil legacy queen 👑

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📜 DOCUMENT SOURCE 📜

this manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML source. the master documentation is at

http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pamvalidate.html

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okay that's the whole page bestie, go forth and validate, your pipeline will thank you 🫶

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netpbm documentation · 22 March 2014 — mwah, that's a wrap, stay validated ✨💖