Creating a PDF file containing the first page of multiple PDFs using Linux command line

pdf-summary.md

Extracting First Pages of Multiple PDFs and Combining Them Into a Single File

Prequisites

• Linux, bash, qpdf, pdfunite

• Your source PDF files collected in a directory (e.g. /tmp/source)

• An empty, temporary folder to collect intermediate files (e.g. /tmp/PDFs)

Commands

cd /tmp/source
mkdir /tmp/PDFs
for x in *.pdf; do qpdf --pages $x 1 -- --empty /tmp/PDFs/$x.pdf; done
pdfunite /tmp/PDFs/* my-target-file.pdf