How to merge the pdf files from all subdirectories?

Question

I want to use pdftk to merge all pdffiles in a directory and all of its subdirectories. I cannot find a --recursive option in the man pages.

Doing this manually (using a GUI) is not an option as it would be too much work.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I don't think this is ideal, but you could:

1. cp all the pdf files of the subdirectories into one directory.

   mkdir all-in-one
   find SomeDirectory -iname '*.pdf' -exec cp {} all-in-one/
   

2. concatenate them

   cd all-in-one
   pdftk *.pdf output output.pdf
   

The disadvantage of this solution is that you have to copy all the files.

Answer 2

This doesn't like file names that include spaces, but it seemed to work for a couple files in two different directories. That is a back quote (same key as the tilde character) surrounding the find|xargs pipeline.

pdftk `find . -name *.pdf -print|xargs echo` cat output out.pdf