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I have 250 pdf files in one folder that I want to merge in one document. The order does not matter. Is there a simple way of doing it?

I can use PDF-Shuffler as suggested here https://askubuntu.com/a/2805/247771 but the progam hangs for 10 minutes befor it has loaded all the pdfs.

Can I achive this maybe with an inline command like

pdftk *.pdf output mergedfiles.pdf

?

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  • 7
    Your pdftk command is just missing a cat I think: pdftk *.pdf cat output mergedfiles.pdf Feb 24, 2017 at 17:04
  • @steeldriver if you write an answer I would mark it as chekced.
    – Adam
    Mar 26, 2018 at 16:15

5 Answers 5

43

I would use pdfunite. It is nice and simple. cd to your directory. Then use something like this:

pdfunite *.pdf all.pdf

(Before running, make sure you don't already have a file called all.pdf in that directory.)

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  • 2
    Using pdfunite version 0.68.0 with Ubuntu 18.10, I had to use pdfunite * all.pdf. When I tried pdfunite *.pdf all.pdf, it gave me the following error I/O Error: Couldn't open file '*.pdf': No such file or directory. Syntax Error: Could not merge damaged documents ('*.pdf') .
    – edesz
    May 5, 2019 at 19:47
  • Works! Perfect!!! Thanks!!
    – ambigus9
    Feb 15, 2023 at 16:47
19

Thanks to steeldriver who showed me that this is doing the job:

pdftk *.pdf cat output mergedfiles.pdf
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  • 1
    I have Kubuntu 19.10. this pdftk does not work.
    – rob grune
    Jan 25, 2020 at 6:59
  • @robgrune pdftk in recent Ubuntu versions is a snap, which only works in your home folder, but fails silently elsewhere - like /tmp which is where I use it the most. Because the failure is silent (a particularly dumb misfeature of snaps) it's caught me out more than once, but a proper installation has worked on all (X|K)ubuntu versions for me for many years. Not also that you can't overwrite an output file in the same folder this way, but that error is clear
    – Chris H
    Jun 7, 2023 at 14:27
  • @ChrisH Installing java version of pdftk whith sudo apt install pdftk-java with version 3.2.2-1 Works with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
    – itbojen
    Jan 26 at 15:52
  • @itbojen yes, I use that. The reason I no longer use Ubuntu for clean installs is the switch from standard behaviour to anti-user modes (software should never refuse silently to do what it's told - if that's a feature of snaps as it seems to be, it means the entire snap system is fundamentally flawed), requiring workarounds. The upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04 is even worse, uninstalling packages (Firefox) that I'd made an effort to install properly , and replacing them with snaps. On my work machine I'll probably do a clean install of Debian instead of upgrading Ubuntu rather than fight snaps
    – Chris H
    Jan 26 at 16:38
11

You can use qpdf as pdftk is not available in Ubuntu Bionic:

qpdf --empty --pages *.pdf -- out.pdf
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  • 2
    Worked in Ubuntu 18.04. Thanks.
    – parisa
    Jun 13, 2019 at 13:58
4
  1. sudo apt-get install gs
  2. gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=target.pdf -dBATCH xx.pdf xx.pdf xx.pdf ...
  3. you can get all filenames through ls -l *.pdf | awk command

Wish it helps . ^_^

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  • On Ubuntu 16.04 I get E: Package 'gs' has no installation candidate.
    – MERose
    Aug 29, 2017 at 19:42
1

You can use pdftools:

pdftools --input-dir dir_with_pdfs --output output.pdf

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