How to write shell script for finding number of pages in PDF?

Question

I am generating a PDF dynamically. How can I check the number of pages in the PDF using a shell script?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14704274/how-to-write-shell-script-for-finding-number-of-pages-in-pdf

Answer 1

Without any extra package:

strings < file.pdf | sed -n 's|.*/Count -{0,1}([0-9]{1,}).*|1|p' 
    | sort -rn | head -n 1

Using pdfinfo:

pdfinfo file.pdf | awk '/^Pages:/ {print $2}'

Using pdftk:

pdftk file.pdf dump_data | grep NumberOfPages | awk '{print $2}'

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You can also recursively sum the total number of pages in all PDFs via pdfinfo as follows:

find . -xdev -type f -name "*.pdf" -exec pdfinfo "{}" ";" | 
    awk '/^Pages:/ {n += $2} END {print n}'