Of course you could use awk or anything else, but for most tasks there are already transforms in the netpbm tools that work well. In addition to being in text f

Of course you could use awk or anything else, but for most tasks there are already transforms in the netpbm tools that work well. In addition to being in text format, the meta info always comes first, which facilitates streaming. That in turn means that if you pipe together four transforms you'll use four cores without even trying.