Merging PDF files via Command line (Build in tools)

Merging several PDF-files into one PDF file; In Linux, you don't have to install any additional software to do this. Everything can be done on the command line with a few simple lines of code. If you however don't like to work on the command line, you might want to install additional software (example: PDF-mod)

To make your life easier, I recommend creating an alias for the PDF merge function. You do that by adding the following code to your .bashrc file in the home folder.

At terminal prompt, type: gedit ~/.bashrc
and add the following to the text:

# -------------------------------------------------
# provide PDF merge function with default         -
# installed code on your system via command-line  -
# -------------------------------------------------
mergepdf() { gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=mergedPDF_`date +'%F_%Hh%M'`.pdf -f "$@" ;}

This will add create an alias with name mergepdf. To merge 2 or more PDF files into one PDF file you use the alias as follows:

mergepdf '~/Documents/file_1.pdf' '~/Documents/file_2.pdf' ... '~/Documents/file_x.pdf'

This will merge all the files into the result file named:

mergedPDF_<DATE>.pdf

NOTE: The first time after creating the alias in the .bashrc file, you will need to close the active terminal session, and re-open a new one.