---
name: "pgmtopgm"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "netpbm"
version: "10.86.51-2"
release: "Arch Linux 2026-11-01"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/pgmtopgm"
---

# pgmtopgm(1)

copy PGM image

## NAME

pgmtopgm - copy PGM image

## SYNOPSIS

**pgmtopgm**

## DESCRIPTION

This program is part of **Netpbm**(1) .

**pgmtopgm** simply copies a PGM image from Standard Input to Standard Output.  This may seem an unnecessary duplication of **cat**, but remember that a PGM program can read a PBM image as if it were PGM.  So **pgmtopgm** can read either a PBM or PGM image and produce a PGM image as output.

Even that is of limited usefulness because of the fact that almost any program to which you would feed the resulting PGM image could also just take the original image directly.  However, sometimes you really need a true PGM image.

When you know you have a PBM image and want a PGM image, **pbmtopgm** is a more general way to do that conversion.

## OPTIONS

There are no command line options defined specifically for **pgmtopgm**, but it recognizes the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (See \
  Common Options ⟨index.html#commonoptions⟩ .)

## SEE ALSO

[**ppmtoppm**(1)](/ppmtoppm/1.md) , [**pamtopam**(1)](/pamtopam/1.md) , [**pamtopnm**(1)](/pamtopnm/1.md) , [**pbmtopgm**(1)](/pbmtopgm/1.md) , **pbm**(1) , **pgm**(1) ,

## HISTORY

This program was added to Netpbm in Release 10.9 (September 2002).

## DOCUMENT SOURCE

This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML source.  The master documentation is at

-

  **http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pgmtopgm.html**