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The wonder of apt-get, how to upgrade your system to merge pdf files

The 2007-08-20 at 20:17 by Loïc d'Anterroches filed under News.

Right now I have to merge some pdf files together. The best tool to do that is pdftk. If you are using a Debian based system, like Ubuntu, just install the pdftk package to use it.

$ sudo apt-get install pdftk

Now, if you want to merge 2 pdf files into one big:

$ pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output bigpdffile.pdf

And now, why the wonder of apt-get? Just because I am using the experimental Gutsy version of Ubuntu on my laptop, and pdftk is broken on this version. I then tried to run it from my home server, but my home server is running Breezy which is not supported any more. Oups… So I to be able to use pdftk I decided to upgraded my server. Imagine, upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP to use a pdf merger. Crazy no?

No! I got a full upgrade of my server, in just one command and in just 10 minutes:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Then

$ sudo apt-get install pdftk

Yeah!

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