Category: Random commands

Posted on

Combine multiple PDF files into a single PDF file

This is one of the oldest entries in my offline notes.  I used it quite a bit years ago.  Simply said, take several .pdf files and combine them into one file.

As always boys and girls – “man gs” in the terminal before you do this.*

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=final.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf

 

*As a side note:  some of the options in the above command are not in the man page on my Debian 9 system.  Man says you may need to install ghostscript-doc and view the pages in /usr/share/doc/ghostscript/

**Looks like “-o” is a shorthand to replace the “-dBATCH -dNOPAUSE” combination.  https://www.ghostscript.com/doc/9.20/Use.htm

Posted on

OS X: force quitting applications

I have a couple of Macs at work.  Funny,  I usually install VirtualBox and live in a Linux VM.  So on those occasions where I need to kill a rogue app in OS X, I get quite peeved when I can’t remember the “we do it differently” key stroke combinations.

Bring up menu:

Command+Option+Escape

From Dock:

Option+Right Click

From Apple Menu:

Shift+Click on Apple in menu

Activity Monitor:

Select app then Quit Process button

From terminal:

kill -9 [pid] or killall [process name]