In the past, I used mutool to remove password protection from PDF files I received. However, recent versions no longer do that – instead, they preserve the encryption.
After a long search for a simple tool, I’ve found just that: QPDF, written in C++ and commonly present in repositories.
Here is how to do the removal:
qpdf encrypted.pdf --decrypt --password=YOURPASSWORD decrypted.pdf
Tagged with: PDF
Written: 2023-01-08