I am using Ubuntu 22.04 and when trying to use ImageMagick to convert pdf to jpeg format I get error. /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml: command not found

Thank you for looking at my situation. I am running Ubuntu 22.04. I wanted to convert a pdf file to a jpeg file format. After typing

dr@Dell-1:~$ sudo /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml

I get the following error

sudo /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml: command not found

I need to edit the policy [some thing I have never done being new to Linux] to allow for pdf files to be used with ImageMagick. Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong?

This answer gives you a detailed account of what you need to do. To overcome the restrictions, there are two possibilities:

1. Remove the policy file all together. Easy to do with a single rm (remove) command, but not secure at all. Thus not preferred.

2. Editing the policy file to only enable PDF operations. Indeed, prefer to take this approach.

To edit the file, you need to open it in a text editor with root (administrator) privileges. There are multiple ways to do that. To make editing as easy as possible, you may want to open the system file in your graphical text editor, gedit in the standard Ubuntu desktop:

env EDITOR=gedit sudoedit /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml

If you can work with the standard terminal based editor nano, then the command simplifies to:

sudoedit /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml

This opens the file in the standard terminal editor, nano on Ubuntu.

The command you attempted yourself just specifies sudo. This command should be followed by another command. sudo will then run that other command with elevated privileges (administrator or root privileges, required to change system files). will run a command following it, which will elevate the following command to root permissions. However, instead of providing a command, you provided the file name. Thus, sudo attempts to run that file as an executable, but that fails because it is not an executable. A way that would have worked, but which is less recommended for security, would be:

sudo nano /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml

The previous commands that use sudoedit are preferred because more secure: the command will copy the system file to a temporary file that can be edited with a normal editor. When saving the file, the system file is updated with the content of the temporary file

One word in the policy.xml needs to be edited in order to give permissions for ImageMagick to convert pdf files to images. ImageMagick also does batch image format conversion (see the example command at the end of this answer). If a pdf file contains multiple pages with images it is convenient to export the pages as single page PDF documents using the PDF Arranger app (sudo apt install pdfarranger) which also identifies each page of the output by including its original page number in its new file name.

1. Edit the policy.xml file /etc/ImageMagick-6/ in the terminal by running this command:

   sudo nano /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml
   

2. Scroll down to the bottom of the file by pressing the down arrow key. Find the line that says <policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="PDF" /> replace none with read|write as shown in the below screenshot in the second to last line.

   

   _{Nano text editor keyboard shortcuts
   Use the keyboard combination Ctrl + O and after that press Enter to save the file to its current location.
   Use the keyboard combination Ctrl + X to exit nano.}

You can verify the results of editing the policy.xml file by running the following commands.

Convert a single pdf page to a .png image:

convert test.pdf test.png

Convert multiple pdf pages in the same directory to images:

mogrify -format png *.pdf 

mogrify commands will overwrite any pdf files that have the exact same name if any such files exist in the current directory, so be careful.