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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
    – steeldriver
    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

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42

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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    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 at 16:47
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Thanks to steeldriver who showed me that this is doing the job:

pdftk *.pdf cat output mergedfiles.pdf
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    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 at 14:27
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You can use qpdf as pdftk is not available in Ubuntu Bionic:

qpdf --empty --pages *.pdf -- out.pdf
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    Worked in Ubuntu 18.04. Thanks.
    – parisa
    Jun 13, 2019 at 13:58
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  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
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You can use pdftools:

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