Split a PDF into single-page files (pdfseparate)
Turn a multi-page PDF into one PDF per page with poppler's pdfseparate.
Run pdfseparate input.pdf page-%d.pdf — the %d placeholder becomes the page number (use -f 3 -l 5 to split only pages 3–5).
01Command
Command
$ pdfseparate input.pdf page-%d.pdf02What it does
pdfseparate writes each selected page of a PDF to its own file; %d in the output name is replaced with the page number. Combined with pdfunite (which merges them back), this lets you reorder or extract an arbitrary subset of pages — split the source, delete what you don't need, then re-join. It comes with poppler-utils, the same package as pdftotext and pdftoppm.
03Risk
!Warning: The %d placeholder is required in the output name, otherwise the command fails. Splitting a large PDF creates many files at once — run it in an empty directory. Form fields and some annotations may not survive the split.
04Undo
Undo
$ rm page-*.pdf05Sources
- pdfseparate(1) - extract single pages from a pdf fileEvidence: pdfseparate extracts pages into single-page PDFs using a %d placeholder in the output filename; -f and -l select first and last page.
- Poppler - PDF rendering library and utilitiesEvidence: pdfseparate is one of the poppler-utils command line tools for manipulating PDF files.
Last verified: 2026-09-18 · Category: Media