July 25, 2023

Merge pdf files freely without installing another programme

Using the utility pdfunite

To merge multiple pdf files into a single pdf file with the utility pdfunite, open your terminal and run:

$ pdfunite pdf_sourcefile1 pdf_sourcefile2 pdf_output

pdf_sourcefile1 et cetera are the pdf files you want to merge.

pdf_output is the name of a pdf file that will be created with all pdf files merged once you have run the command.

To learn more about pdftunite run:

$ man pdfunite

pdfunite is copyleft-licensed and was first released in 1995. It was written, and is still developed, by Derek Noonburg¹.

Using Ghostscript

You can also use Ghostscript to merge multiple pdf files into one pdf file.

To merge multiple pdf files into one single pdf file run:

$ gs 
-q \ 
-sPAPERSIZE=letter \ 
-dNOPAUSE \ 
-dBATCH \ 
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \ 
-sOutputFile=merged.pdf \
pdf_sourcefile1 \
pdf_sourcefile2

You can run $ man gs to understand what each option does.

If you don’t know whether Ghostscript is installed on your operating system, on GNU/Linux, you can check by running in your terminal:

$ dpkg -s ghostscript

dpkg is a package manager. The option -s (or –status) prints the status of a programme e.g. whether a program is installed. If so, you should see a line printing:

Status: install ok installed

You can also run:

$ dpkg -s ghostscript | grep installed

grep will print the line that matches keyword ‘installed’.

If you need to install Ghostscript run:

$ sudo apt install ghostscript

Ghostscript is copyleft-licensed and was released in 1988 by L. Peter Deutsch.

xpdfreader’s website.↩︎

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