How to generate an image from OSM on command line?

Question

Is there a GNU/Linux command line tool that allows to generate an image file from OSM, preferably as an SVG?

Answer 1

Here's a dedicated page for OSM SVG exporting: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SVG

One way to do this through command line would be to use Maperitive - here's a tutorial on how to generate SVG. You can simply write all the commands mentioned in the tutorial into a text file and run Maperitive with the file specified in the command line. Here are some user-written instructions on how to install Maperitive on Linux.

(Disclaimer: I'm the author of Maperitive).

Answer 2

A Perl script called Geo-OSM-Tiles-0.02 might just do the job. From the module's description:

This script downloads all map tiles from an OpenStreetMap tile server for some geographic
region in a range of zoom levels. The PNG images of the tiles are stored in a directory   
tree that mirrors the paths from the server. 

A bounding box of geographic coordinates and a range of zoom levels must be selected 
by command line options.

Output's PNGs though.