Remove First Page from a Series of PDFs

Question

I have a series of PDFs (Computer Gaming World issues) and I want to remove the first page from the pdf file of each issue. There are 100 issues, so a GUI is just not gonna cut it. I used pdftk to remove the first page from one issue:

pdftk 1981_1112_issue1.pdf cat 1 output 1.pdf

My problem is that I do not want to have to modify and run this command for every pdf issue as that is not much better than the GUI method.

Using *.pdf as an input does not seem to work. What other ways can I use to run pdftk on every PDF?

Not exactly...you'll notice the year is the first term in the filename, and the years definitely vary. But I could easily mass rename... — Richard Martinez, Oct 16 '10 at 09:03
They do. It's all year_quarter_issue#.pdf. also, pdftk *_issue*.pdf cat 1 output *.pdf seems to provide the correct input, but then what do I call the output file? — Richard Martinez, Oct 16 '10 at 09:08
Your example command does **not** remove the 1st page from the input PDF. It extracts the 1st page from the input into a single page output PDF (1.pdf) and leaves the input untouched. — Kurt Pfeifle, Oct 18 '10 at 17:53

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 16 '10 at 09:29

6

Loop on all issues. Output is named after issue by replacing "issue" by "output". The first line extract page 1, the second line extract the other pages:

for issue in *_issue*.pdf
do
    pdftk ${issue} cat 1 output page1_${issue/issue/output}
    pdftk ${issue} cat 2-end output otherpages_${issue/issue/output}
done

answered Oct 16 '10 at 09:29

mouviciel

66,855
13
106
140

Oh I see how this works. I have done some programming but I didn't realize how variables worked in bash. What exactly are you doing with ${issue/issue/output}? – Richard Martinez Oct 16 '10 at 09:39
${a/b/c} replaces the b substring by the c substring in the contents of the a variable. – mouviciel Oct 16 '10 at 10:13

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 16 '10 at 09:27

1

shopt -s nullglob
for file in *.pdf
do
 out=${file%.pdf}_page1.pdf
 pdftk "$file" cat 1 output "$out"
done

answered Oct 16 '10 at 09:27

ghostdog74

327,991
56
259
343

I like this answer for its straightforwardness. Is the shopt line necessary? – Richard Martinez Oct 16 '10 at 09:44

Remove First Page from a Series of PDFs

2 Answers2