Splitting all files in a folder with pdftk

Question

I'm trying to use pdftk to split a folder containing pdf files into their constituent pages. Here is my code:

~/MCO/MCOs$ for file in *.pdf; do pdftk "$file" burst; done

The command itself does not seem to be incorrect, but I get a java error as follows:

Unhandled Java Exception in create_output():
Unhandled Java Exception in main():
java.lang.NullPointerException
  at gnu.gcj.runtime.NameFinder.lookup(libgcj.so.16)
  at java.lang.Throwable.getStackTrace(libgcj.so.16)
  at java.lang.Throwable.stackTraceString(libgcj.so.16)
  at java.lang.Throwable.printStackTrace(libgcj.so.16)
  at java.lang.Throwable.printStackTrace(libgcj.so.16)

There seems to be some recognition of this issue, but it is unclear how/if it has been resolved.

I'm trying to get my output such that for an example file 'ad.pdf' is split into 'ad.pdf_01' and 'ad.pdf_02' if it contains two pages.

Answer 1

The issue seems to be that pdftk burst defaults to naming its output files as pg_0001.pdf, pg_0002.pdf and so on regardless of the input file name.

Exactly why that causes errors is not clear - possibly it starts to process the next file before the previous output file(s) have been closed. In any case, overwriting files is obviously not desirable in this case - so the solution is to change the output on a per-file basis.

According to the pdftk manual page:

                    To name these pages yourself, supply a
printf-styled format string via the output section.  For
example, if you want pages named: page_01.pdf, page_02.pdf,
etc., pass output page_%02d.pdf to pdftk.

so for example you could do

for file in *.pdf; do pdftk "$file" burst output "${file%.pdf}-%02d.pdf"; done

which for inputs fileA.pdf, fileB.pdf will result in output files fileA-01.pdf, fileA-02.pdf, ... fileB-nm.pdf (removing and re-adding the .pdf extension after the numeric suffix).

If you really want ad.pdf --> ad.pdf_01 that would be "${file}_%02d".

Answer 2

I would

• Make sure your pdftk is at version 2.01 because the issue should be fixed, according to the issue you linked.
• Try with a different JRE installed, link OpenJDK or Oracle JRE.
• Try Sejda, command line, open source and does split PDF files (among the other things), you can customize output names.

Unfortunately that's a uncaught NullPointerException and there isn't any details so it's hard to tell what is going wrong.