pamnoise

Updated: 13 September 2026
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NAME

pgmnoise - create a PAM image made up of white noise (random numbers)

SYNOPSIS

pamnoise [-width=n] [-height=n] [-depth=n] [-maxval=n] [-tupletype=text] [-randomseed=integer] [-verbose=]

Minimum unique abbreviations of option are acceptable. You may use double hyphens instead of single hyphen to denote options. You may use white space in place of the equals sign to separate an option name from its value.

For backward compatibility, you can alternatively specify the width and height as arguments.

DESCRIPTION

This program is part of Netpbm.

pamnoise creates a PAM image that is made up of random samples.

OPTIONS

In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet, see Common Options), pgmnoise recognizes the following command line options:

-height=n
The height of the generated image in rows.

Default is 1.

-width=n
The width of the generated image in columns.

Default is 1.

-depth=n
The depth of the generated image in planes.

Default is 1.

-maxval=n
The maxval of the generated image.

Default is 255.

-tupletype=n
The PAM tuple type of the generated image.

Default is a null string.

-randomseed=integer
This is the seed for the random number generator that generates the pixels.

Use this to ensure you get the same image on separate invocations.

By default, pgmnoise uses a seed derived from the time of day and process ID, which gives you fairly uncorrelated results in multiple invocations.

-verbose
This causes the program to issue messages informational messages about what it is doing.

SEE ALSO

AUTHOR

pamnoise was written by Akira F Urushibata in 2026 and contributed to the public domain by its author.

HISTORY

pamnoise was new in Netpbm 11.16 (September 2026).

Before that, you can use pgmnoise to make a single plane of random numbers and pamstack to combine single planes into deeeper PAM images.


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