mat2 - Man Page
the metadata anonymisation toolkit 2
Examples (TL;DR)
- List supported file formats:
mat2 --list - Remove metadata from a file:
mat2 path/to/file - Remove metadata from a file and print detailed output to the console:
mat2 --verbose path/to/file - Show metadata in a file without removing it:
mat2 --show path/to/file - Partially remove metadata from a file:
mat2 --lightweight path/to/file - Remove metadata from a file in place, without creating a backup:
mat2 --inplace path/to/file
Synopsis
Description
mat2 removes metadata from various fileformats. It supports a wide variety of file formats, audio, office, images, …
Careful, mat2 does not clean files in-place, instead, it will produce a file with the word "cleaned" between the filename and its extension, for example "filename.cleaned.png" for a file named "filename.png".
Options
positional arguments
- files
the files to process
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
- -V, --verbose
show more verbose status information
- --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
- -L, --lightweight
remove SOME metadata
- --no-sandbox
disable bubblewrap's sandboxing
- --inplace
clean in place, without backup
Examples
To remove all the metadata from a PDF file:
mat2 ./myfile.pdf
Notes About Metadata
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.
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.
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://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2/issues
Please use accordingly and be careful.
Author
This software was made by Julien (jvoisin) Voisin with the support of the Tails project.
Copyright
This software is released on LGPLv3.
See Also
exiftool(1p) pdf-redact-tools(1)