Q. How do I find out more information about Portable Document Format (PDF) document from a shell prompt? How do I find out information such as what software used to create a pdf file, its page size, and its creation date etc, using the terminal?


A. You need to use pdfinfo command which, prints the contents of the ‘Info’ dictionary (plus some other useful information) from a Portable Document Format (PDF) file.

pdfinfo to view tech information about a pdf file

Type the command as follows:
$ pdfinfo {file.pdf}
$ pdfinfo lecture5.pdf
Sample output:

Title:          Telecommunication Protocols Laboratory Course
Author:         kraj
Creator:        LaTeX with hyperref package
Producer:       dvips + GPL Ghostscript 8.62
CreationDate:   Thu Apr  1 11:32:03 2004
ModDate:        Thu Apr  1 11:32:38 2004
Tagged:         yes
Pages:          68
Encrypted:      no
Page size:      538 x 718 pts
File size:      1683167 bytes
Optimized:      yes
PDF version:    1.3

Specify the owner password for the PDF file. Providing this will bypass all security restrictions.
$ pdfinfo -opw password file.pdf
Specify the user password for the PDF file.
$ pdfinfo -upw password file.pdf