[GTALUG] bash seq question

Stewart C. Russell scruss at gmail.com
Thu Feb 2 19:22:34 EST 2017


Hi Russell -

> It's not often I have to assemble larger numbered documents. I usually
> use this little script.
> 
> enscript -L1 -F --header-font=Times-Roman12 -b '||$%' -o- < <(for i in
> $(seq "$(pdftk "$1" dump_data | grep "Num" | cut -d":" -f2)"); do echo;
> done) | ps2pdf - | pdftk "$1" multistamp - output "${1%.pdf}-numbered.pdf"

I've used something similar myself many times. Your grep command should be:

	grep '^PageMediaNumber:'

as you're also matching 'PageLabelNumStyle' content. These aren't
numeric values, and will cause seq to fail. It may also be possible for
PageMediaNumber to return something like '1-1'.

Personally, I'd use pdfinfo rather than pdftk … dump_data to do page
counts, as its Pages field is always numeric.

Bates Numbering is fun!

cheers,
 Stewart




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