Mac Terminal change PDF author

Question

I need to change the author of a PDF file on my Mac. I have tried to use grep and sed to accomplish this, but haven't succeeded.

If I open a PDF file in Preview.app and go to Tools > Show Inspector I see "Author: yonatan".

Is it possible to use Terminal.app to change this string?

Thanks

P.S. I know I can create a new User Account on my Mac or use Adobe Acrobat Professional.

Answer 1

1. open Automator & create a New Workflow
2. search "spec" & add Get Specified Finder Items
3. search "meta" & add Set PDF Metadata
4. drag-drop the desired PDFs onto the Get Specified Finder Items area
5. in the Set PDF Metadata area, update the metadata
6. in the upper-right corner, click [Run]

For more detail see the screenshot below:

Answer 2

A better way would be to make use of exiftool, which on Mac you could install with use of Homebrew:

brew install exiftool

You would then edit your metadata in your PDF in the following manner:

exiftool  -Title="Change This Title" -Subject="Fun and PDF" change_my_meta.pdf

Removing metadata

If you only want to remove metadata you can use pdf-redact-tools:

pdf-redact-tools --sanitize untrusted.pdf