Question

It has been discovered that several users have been uploading secured (password protected) .pdf’s into our document collaboration/review system. When a user is reviewing documents, and comes upon one of these, we get unexpected results (crashes, lockups, etc).

I have been asked to determine where and how many secure .pdf’s have been put into the filesystem (I don’t even have a ballpark guess yet). Ideally, I’d generate a list of these offenders and we could remove them or save non-secure versions. The .pdf’s are stored in a normal windows file system, with sub-folders for each individual upload session.

Would there be any way to do this without opening hundreds of .pdf’s? Some utility that could maybe “peek” for me? Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

-U. 344639

Answer 1

You should look into the commandline utility pdfinfo.exe. That one ships as part of the XPDF-Tools for Windows.

Then script it around this core command

for %f in (*.pdf) do (pdfinfo.exe %i | findstr Encrypted:)

All returns of Encrypted: no are OK for you, the others aren’t…