Ubuntu – Rearrange PDF pages using the command-line

NOTE: This solution only works for Ubuntu versions up through 17.10. Ubuntu 18.04 and later do not have the pdftk package due to the packages being removed due to the dependencies to run the package being removed from the Archive for Bionic and later.

NOTE2: even if officially removed from 18.04, there is a snap version of pdftk; you can install it with snap install pdftk.

You can use pdftk. Install it with sudo apt-get install pdftk. Then, suppose you want to rotate the page 4 of your document test.pdf 90 degree clockwise:

pdftk test.pdf cat 1-3 4east 5-end output out.pdf 

You can do much more in pdftk, changing page order, rotation, merging various PDF files. The manual page is your friend here.

From man pdftk, referring to the cat operation:

<input PDF handle>[<begin page number>[-<end page num‐ ber>[<qualifier>]]][<page rotation>]

             Where the handle identifies one of the input PDF files, and
             the beginning and ending page numbers are one-based refer‐
             ences to pages in the PDF file.  The qualifier can be even or
             odd, and the page rotation can be north, south, east, west,
             left, right, or down.

You can achieve this with just a single grep command. This is because GNU grep lets you use a Perl regular expression (-P), which supports zero-width lookaround assertions (\K and (?= ), in this case):

grep -oP '^\[\K\d+(?=\])' infile

As written, that will send the output to your terminal. To redirect it to a file, use:

grep -oP '^\[\K\d+(?=\])' infile > outfile

This method has the advantage of brevity and simplicity. It matches text that

• is preceded by (\K)

  • a [ character(\[) -- \ is needed as [ otherwise has a special meaning in regular expressions
  • that appears at the beginning of a line (^);

• consists of one or more (+) digits (\d);

• is followed by ((?= ))

  • a ] character (\]) -- like with [, \ forces ] to be matched literally.