Matthew Lenz

The perl module you’ll want to install is called PerlMagick (Image::Magick) and rather than loading the image into memory you can just use the Ping method. The Ping method returns an array with 4 elements of information for each page of a multi-page TIFF/PDF. If we divide the number of elements by 4 we know how many pages there are in the TIFF/PDF.

use Image::Magick;

my $im = Image::Magick->new();

my @ping_info = $im->Ping('fax.tif');

## If we access an @rray in a scalar context we get the element count
my $count = @ping_info / 4;

print $count;

There you have it, good luck.

UPDATE:

The example above may or may not work properly with PDF’s.  Even if it does work it appears that ImageMagick makes an external call to the ghostscript (gs) executable on the system to determine the properties of the pdf.  Here is an example that will work for PDFs:

use PDF::API2;

my $pdf = PDF::API2->open('2.pdf');
print $pdf->pages();

I’m guessing that eventually ImageMagick won’t be “broken” but you can use the above in the meantime.