Remove only 1st page from a LOT of pdf files

Question

That's all I have to do: remove only 1st page from a LOT of pdf files...

Please tell me that magic exists.

Answer 1

You can do this with a free program called pdftk, available here.

You can use the following commands to take every PDF in the current directory and copy them to the ‘trimmed’ directory with the first page removed:

mkdir trimmed
for i in *pdf ; do pdftk "$i" cat 2-end output "trimmed/$i" ; done

Answer 2

This looks like a job for PdfToolKit. This a command line utility to manipulate pdfs

First, install PDFToolkil, either from the Software Centre or using the command line:

sudo apt-get install pdftk

Now the command to remove the first page from a normal (non-protected pdf) would be:

pdftk original.pdf cat 2-end output outputname.pdf

If the pdf is protected you will need to give the passwords to pdftk.

To convert a large number of pdf's you will need to write a small script that takes care of running pdftk for each one.

Answer 3

You can use pdf-stapler for this task.

Example:

for i in *.pdf; do pdf-stapler del "$i" 1 t.pdf && mv t.pdf "$i"; done

Answer 4

I wrote this command line

tree -fai . | grep -P ".pdf$" | xargs -L1 -I {} pdftk {} cat 2-end output {}.truncated.pdf

Does the job, but of course if the file has more than one page, I tested it, it also works with as many levels of folders you have. Just make sure that you run it a the root of the folder structure. Every folder will have for every pdf file an aditional pdf ending with .truncated.pdf

You need pdftk and tree for this and on Ubuntu Linux you can install it with apt:

sudo apt install pdftk tree