All options may be abbreviated to the shortest unique prefix. You may use two hyphens instead of one. You may separate an option from its value with a space instead of =.
This program is part of Netpbm.
pamstack reads multiple PAM or PNM images as input and produces a PAM image as output, consisting of all the planes (channels) of the inputs, stacked in the order specified.
The output is the same dimensions as the inputs, except that the depth is the sum of the depths of the inputs. It has the same maxval. pamstack fails if the inputs are not all the same width, height, and maxval. The tuple type is a null string unless you specify the -tupletype option.
pamchannel does the opposite of pamstack: It extracts individual planes from a single PAM.
Use pamtopnm to convert a suitable PAM image to a more traditional PNM (PBM, PGM, or PPM) image.
One example of using pamstack is that some Netpbm programs accept as input a PAM that represents graphic image with transparency information. Taking a color image for example, this would be a PAM with tupel type "RGB_ALPHA". In Netpbm, such images were traditionally represented as two images - a PPM for the color and a PGM for the transparency. To convert a PPM/PGM pair into PAM(RGB_ALPHA) input that newer programs require, do something like this:
$ pamstack -tupletype=RGB_ALPHA myimage.ppm myalpha.pgm | \ pamtouil >myimage.uil