Merging PDFs with ghostscript

Just a quick tip tonight, mostly for Linux/Unix users (though there is no reason the clever Windows users couldn't use this too).
As you may already be aware, ghostscript is a (free) tool for working with Adobe's pdf and postscript formats. Among the uses I have found for it is concatenating pdf files (in this case chapters of an ebook to make it easier to search the whole thing). While you can do this with Acrobat reader in Windows, it is a quick single liner on the command line using ghostscript:

gs -DBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf... fileN.pdf

If you're like me and have your source pdfs scattered around a bunch of subdirectories you can try this command (for the BASH shell)

find | grep -i pdf |xargs gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf

You might want to try the command first without the call to xargs and gs (ghostscript) to make sure only the files you want are selected.

Note: I have talked about ghostscript before

Flash 9 Beta For Linux! (and others)

It has been too long since Adobe/Macromedia has released an update to Flash for Linux. Many sites require version 8, but only seven existed, until very recently. It turns out that Adobe has a publicly available beta of Flash 9 for Linux available here. I can't think of any sites that specifically require >=flash 8 off the top of my head, but the new version does seem to work quite well with google video and the like.

Not a Linux user? Still want to try out the latest and greatest? There are also versions for Windows and Mac at the same site.