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How to remove PDF password using qpdf CLI

Authors

These days pretty much all the bank/credit card statements or anything related to finance comes under password-protected PDF.

Sometimes, you might just want to keep things simple since you'll be storing those files in a secure place anyway.

Let's see how we can remove the password from your PDF using qpdf

Dependency

You can install qpdf on Mac using brew

brew install qpdf

Refer to their docs for other operating systems.

Removing password from PDF

Once you've installed the dependency. You can remove the password and replace it with the original file with the following snippet.

qpdf --decrypt   --replace-input "~/Downloads/example.pdf" --password="YourPasswordHere"

You can even create a bash script for your convenience like this

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Usage: <file> <password> Uses qpdf to rewrite the file without encryption.
local file="$1"
local password="$2"
qpdf --decrypt   --replace-input "$file" --password="$password"

And ./pdf-password-remover "~/Downloads/example.pdf" YourPasswordHere

Happy password-less pdf!