trying to script a command line

[Craig White]

That doesn't seem to work. I quoted the part of the man page that the
'-' is used to pass only a single PDF into pdftk via stdin and thus the
xargs thing seems not to fly.

$ cat I-A-files.txt | xargs -0 pdftk cat output I-A.pdf verbose
Error: No input files.  Exiting.
Errors encountered.  No output created.
Done.  Input errors, so no output created.

Thanks

Craig

On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 17:24 -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
> Give this a try:
> 
> cat /path/to/filenames_file.xt |xargs pdftk
> 
> -Charles
> 
> Craig White wrote:
> > I have an awkward situation with pdftk
> >
> > I have a file with filenames that I want to pass to pdftk as input
> > files.
> >
> > according to the man page...
> > <input PDF files | - | PROMPT>
> >   A list of the input PDF files. If you plan to combine these PDFs
> >   (without using handles) then list files in the  order  you  want
> >   them combined.  Use - to pass a single PDF into pdftk via stdin.
> >
> > and thus, this doesn't work...
> >
> > pdftk `cat "/mypath/to/I-A-files.txt"` cat output I-A.pdf verbose 
> >
> > fails on spaces within the paths/filenames in that file.
> >
> > I have tried both escaping the spaces with \ and enclosing each path
> > within a double quote but neither works.
> >
> > I have also tried (which fails)...
> >
> > $ cat "/mypath/to/I-A-files.txt" | pdftk - cat output I-A.pdf verbose
> > Error: Failed to open PDF file:
> >    -
> > Errors encountered.  No output created.
> > Done.  Input errors, so no output created.
> > sh-3.2$ ls -l
> > total 4440
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 craig administrative      10 2008-03-04 15:15 doc_toc.html
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 craig administrative    1898 2008-03-04 15:30 I-A-files.txt
> >
> > Any suggestions on this?
> >
> > T
> 
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