Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,

Can anyone please help me providing script to get the number of pages in a PDF file?


TIA
Prvn

Writing a script will not do it. Depending on the software that created the pdf and whether or not it is encrypted is way beyond shell, and probably something a casual C coder would want to try.

Your best bet is to find some software like pdf2txt. Then run it from the command line, and grep for ^L - ascii 12 - which is a page feed. There is probably something like pdf2txt in the open source area, ie., free. Try connecting to SourceForge.net: Welcome to SourceForge.net, use the search engine there, and find pdf conversion software.

Someone else here may know of a free product that is good. I don't.

You might also try using pdf2ps if you have ghostscript, and then using:
"grep -c showpage" on the output file to count the number of pages.

You could also try the pdftk app pdftk - the pdf toolkit

To get the number of pages:
pdftk file.pdf dump_data output | grep -i Num
NumberOfPages: 1

The following is a short shell script which I hacked together based on the PDF Reference V1.7 which seems to do the job across a wide spectrum of PDF document types.

Code:

#!/bin/ksh93
#
#  USAGE: pdfcount file.pdf
#

[[ "$#" != "1" ]] && {
   print "ERROR: No file specified"
   exit 1
}

numpages=0

strings $1 | grep "/Count" |
while read line
do
   num=${line/*([[:print:]])+(Count )?(-)+({1,4}(\d))*([[:print:]])/\4}
   (( num > numpages)) && numpages=$num
done

print $numpages

exit 0

Note this shell script is written for ksh93, not pdksh or ksh88. It can easily be ported to other shells but that I will leave as an exercise to the reader.

Hello

i´m interestet in your php code for pdf page nummber count.

br ulibo

if you are familiar with Perl, check the PDF CPAN module

something like:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# get_pages_in_pdf_file.pl

use PDF;
my $filename = shift;

my $this_pdf = PDF->new;
$this_pdf = PDF->new($filename);

print "Has ", $this_pdf->Pages, " Pages \n";