CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pdfmergeterminalcatpdftk
Giacomo Scarpino
Giacomo Scarpino

Reputation: 647

Merge certain pdf pages in one pdf with pdftk

I have some pdf files

and I'd like to merge only their 2nd pages in one pdf file. I've tried the following pdftk command with a list of file example

pdftk *.pdf cat 2 output test.pdf

but the result I get in test.pdf is just the a.pdf's 2nd page.. Any ideas? 

$ pdftk *.pdf cat 2 output test.pdf verbose
Command Line Data is valid.

Input PDF Filenames & Passwords in Order
( <filename>[, <password>] ) 
   Lettera_Contributi_201701-1.pdf
   Lettera_Contributi_201701-2.pdf
   Lettera_Contributi_201701-3.pdf
   Lettera_Contributi_201701-4.pdf
   Lettera_Contributi_201701-5.pdf
   Lettera_Contributi_201701-6.pdf

The operation to be performed: 
   cat - Catenate given page ranges into a new PDF.

The output file will be named:
   test.pdf

Output PDF encryption settings:
   Output PDF will not be encrypted.

No compression or uncompression being performed on output.

Creating Output ...
   Adding page 2 X0X  from Lettera_Contributi_201701-1.pdf

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2623

Answers (1)

Artur Łysik
Artur Łysik

Reputation: 437

You may do it in two steps using 'find':

1) find all source PDFs in a current folder and execute 'pdftk' on everyone of them:

find . -name \*pdf -exec pdftk A={} cat A2 output {}_2 \;

( Above command finds all the files which have names ending with "pdf" and runs a command given after -exec. Brackets { } are substituted with a name of each file that was found. )

You'll get a set of new PDFs containing only a second page each. They will be named like: original_filename.pdf_2

e.g.

  • file1.pdf_2
  • file2.pdf_2
  • file3.pdf_2

2) now you can merge all the new PDFs:

pdftk \*pdf_2 output out.pdf

You will get out.pdf containing all the second pages of original PDFs.

Upvotes: 0

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