PBMLIFE(1)

💖 PBMLIFE(1) — Pbmlife User Manual, General Commands Manual 💖

okay bestie, sit down, hydrate, and let me tell you about pbmlife — it lives in the General Commands Manual section and honestly? it's giving tiny program, enormous power. ✨

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🦋 NAME 🦋

pbmlife — apply Conway's rules of Life to a PBM image 🧬

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

pbmlife [pbmfile]

that's it. that's the whole invocation. one optional file, no drama, no chaos, just life happening. 🎀

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

So first things first: this program is part of Netpbm(1). You know, the family. The whole squad. 🫶

Here's the tea: pbmlife reads a PBM image as input, applies the rules of Life to it for one generation, and produces a PBM image as output. One generation. That's the whole bit. Like, it doesn't loop forever and show you a movie — it does one step and hands you the result, and if you want more generations you just keep feeding it back in, iykyk. 💫

Now the important part, the vibe check of the pixels:

• A white pixel in the image = a live beastie 🦠✨
• A black pixel = empty space 🌌

That's the whole mapping. White is alive, black is the void. No cap.

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

Okay so hear me out — there are no command line options defined specifically for pbmlife. None. Zero. She's low maintenance. 💅

BUT — and this is the key part — it recognizes the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm. (Go look at Common Options if you want the full list, bestie.)

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• pbm(1) 🌈

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🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

Copyright (C) 1988, 1991 by Jef Poskanzer. 👑

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🧚 DOCUMENT SOURCE 🧚

Fun little meta moment: this manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool makeman from HTML source. The master documentation lives at:

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

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⚠️ reminder bestie: this page is netpbm documentation, dated 21 February 1991, and the manual it belongs to is the Pbmlife User Manual(1). Sending you love, one generation at a time. 🍓💜🦋