Combining PDF Files On The Command Line

VERSION

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

PROBLEM

You have to create a single PDF file by combining multiple files - for example individually scanned pages.

ASSUMPTIONS

You know how to start a shell and havigate to the directory containing the files.

SOLUTION

If individual PDF files are named, for example, doc_01.pdf, doc_02.pdf, doc_03.pdf, doc_04.pdf, then you can combine them with the gs command:

    $ gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=mydocument.pdf doc_*.pdf

The resulting PDF file will contain all pages from the individual files.

MORE INFO

The gs command is part of the ghostscript rpm package. You can find more about it using man gs, the documentation file /usr/share/doc/ghostscript-*/index.html or http://www.ghostscript.com.