All options can be abbreviated to their shortest unique prefix. You may use two hyphens instead of one to designate an option. You may use either white space or an equals sign between an option name and its value.
This program is part of Netpbm.
mdatopbm reads a MicroDesign file as input and Produces a PBM image as output.
If you don't specify mdafile, mdatopbm takes its input from Standard Input.
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet, see Common Options), mdatopbm recognizes the following command line options:
Before Netpbm 11.17 (December 2026), only the abbreviation -d works.
Before Netpbm 11.17 (December 2026), only the abbreviation -i works.
The program also accepts option -a for historical reasons, for the same meaning as the Netpbm common option -plain.
Also, for backward compatibility, it accepts -D, -I, and -A.