Extracting the Second Page From Multiple PDFs on macOS

If you have a folder of PDFs and need page 2 of each, pulled out and merged into one file, doing it by hand in Preview does not scale past a handful of documents. The command line does. Two toolchains handle it on macOS: Poppler’s pdfseparate/pdfunite, and pdftk.

Prerequisites

Install whichever tool you pick through Homebrew. If you do not have Homebrew:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Approach 1: Poppler (pdfseparate and pdfunite)

brew install poppler

Extract page 2 from every PDF in the current folder:

for f in *.pdf
do
    base="$(basename "$f" .pdf)"
    # Extract only page 2 and save it as base-page2.pdf
    pdfseparate -f 2 -l 2 "$f" "${base}-page2.pdf"
done

-f 2 -l 2 tells pdfseparate to start and end on page 2, so it pulls out exactly one page per file. Then merge the results in filename order:

pdfunite *-page2.pdf combined-second-pages.pdf

Clean up the intermediate files once you have combined-second-pages.pdf:

rm *-page2.pdf

Approach 2: pdftk

pdftk (PDF Toolkit) is older but still handles splitting and merging well.

brew install pdftk

Same loop, different syntax:

for f in *.pdf
do
    base="$(basename "$f" .pdf)"
    # Extract only page 2 and save it as base-page2.pdf
    pdftk "$f" cat 2 output "${base}-page2.pdf"
done

pdftk ./*-page2.pdf cat output combined-second-pages.pdf
rm *-page2.pdf

Troubleshooting

• No output files: check that your PDFs actually end in .pdf (lowercase) and that you are in the right directory.
• Command not found: Homebrew links binaries onto your PATH automatically, but a fresh Terminal session may need to be restarted to pick it up.
• Permissions errors: work in a directory you own rather than fighting for elevated privileges.

Either toolchain turns a tedious manual task into a few minutes of scripting, and the same loop works for any page or page range, not just page 2.