pdfcrack command not found

In this troubleshooting guide we learn how to fix pdfcrack command not found error message

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

pdfcrack: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: pdfcrack: command not found

Solutions to pdfcrack: command not found

How To Fix pdfcrack: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu pdfcrack is provided by pdfcrack package.

pdfcrack is:

PDFCrack is a simple tool for recovering passwords from pdf-documents.

It should be able to handle all pdfs that uses the standard security handler but the pdf-parsing routines are a bit of a quick hack so you might stumble across some pdfs where the parser needs to be fixed to handle.

The main PDFCrack features are:

  • Supports the standard security handler (revision 2, 3 and 4) on all known PDF-versions.
  • Supports cracking both owner and userpasswords.
  • Both wordlists and bruteforcing the password are supported.
  • Simple permutations (currently only trying first character as Upper Case).
  • Save and load a running job.
  • Simple benchmarking.
  • Optimised search for owner-password when user-password is known.

This program can be used in forensics investigations or similar activities, to legal password crack.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install pdfcrack

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install pdfcrack.

sudo apt -y install pdfcrack

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install pdfcrack

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix pdfcrack command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.