pdal(1)

pdal 👑✨

okay bestie, welcome to the pdal(1) manual — yes that's the section-1 manual page for PDAL, the Point Data Abstraction Library's one and only app 💅. this is your girl explaining it to you like we're on facetime, but every single fact stays, fr fr. no cap.

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🌸 NAME 🌸

pdal — the PDAL application. that's it, that's the name, and she's iconic 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

pdal <options>
pdal <command> <command options>

literally just that. run it bare, or run it with a command and that command's own options. periodt 💖

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so PDAL consists of a single application, called pdal. yes, single. one app, many little subcommands, like one girl with forty different aesthetics 💀

the pdal application currently has these subcommands, and I'm listing every single one because we don't skip:

• delta
• density
• diff
• ground
• info
• merge
• pcl
• pipeline
• random
• split
• tindex
• translate
• view

to run one, you invoke the pdal application plus the command name, like so:

$ pdal info myfile.las
$ pdal translate input.las output.las
$ pdal pipeline --stdin < myxml.xml

look at her go 😭🫶

wanna know how a command works? every command's help is right there behind the --help switch. and if you need the tea on particular drivers and their options, the --drivers and --options switches have you covered:

$ pdal info --help
$ pdal translate --drivers
$ pdal pipeline --options writers.las

also!! you can pass additional driver-specific options by using a namespace-prefixed option name. for example, setting the LAS day of year at translation time looks like this:

$ pdal translate \
    --writers.las.creation_doy="42" \
    input.las \
    output.las

📝 Note driver-specific options can be identified using the pdal info--options invocation.

for even more detail, go see ⟨http://pdal.io/apps.html⟩ 🌈

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

here's the whole menu, bestie. every flag, no crumbs left behind:

• --debug — sets the output level to 3 (heads up: this option is deprecated 💀)
• -v, --verbose — sets the output level (0-8). dial that volume up or down, your call 🎚️
• --drivers — lists available drivers. it's giving window shopping 🛍️
• -h, --help — displays help text. when in doubt, ask for help, we love a queen who does 🫶
• --list-commands — lists available commands. all thirteen of them, lined up and ready ✨
• --version — shows the program version. know your era 💅
• --options=<driver name> — shows options for the specified driver (or 'all' if you're feeling greedy 👑)

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and that's the whole page, my love 🧚💜

this lil love letter is from the pdal(1) manual, dated 07 March 2022, and it's the pdal page, section 1. go forth, process those point clouds, and slay 💖🌸🦋✨