I understand that operating systems crash.  This happens, I know.  However, the frequency in which my Windows installation crashes is just sad.  This usually only causes annoyance when it crashes in the middle of a game.  I can deal with that.  However, when I am updating an application, such as, I don’t know….Left 4 Dead and Windows crashes, I have 30 minutes of pain, and an hour+ of waiting.  I assumed that steam would do like it does when it installs a game.  If you shut down the system, it pauses the download, and then resumes it.  But when my system crashed it ate the update, and it wouldn’t launch.

Then I tried to remove and then reinstall via steam.  This failed.  Then I tried to remove the game files.  This failed.  After seaching I found a page that talked about removing the client blob file.  That failed.  I eventually had to remove all the files but the steam.exe and the steamApps folder.  But I did have to remove any files that talked about L4D.

So, after about 1 hour of downloading I should have a ready to play game.  Sigh.  If only the other peices, like the game verification, game removal or update worked I would have this hassle.

I’ve always found a need for this, and with some digging, I’ve found a couple of ways to do this.  The simplist is with ImageMagik, but I’ve found the default values leave the quality a little lacking.  However, I’ve found an article that uses GhostScript to do it, and it does a wonderful job.

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf input1.pdf input2.pdf

They suggest putting it in an alias, but I’ve gone a step further and just put it in a bash script in ~/bin/combinepdf

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -le 1 ]
then
     echo "usage: combinepdf output.pdf input1.pdf ... inputN.pdf"
exit -1
fi

OUTPUT=$1

if [ -e $OUTPUT ]
then
     echo "Output file \"$OUTPUT\" exists"
exit -1
fi

fnum=2

INPUT="$2"
ARGV=( $@ )

while [ $fnum -lt $# ]
do
     INPUT=`echo $INPUT" "${ARGV[$fnum]}`
     let "fnum += 1"
done

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=$OUTPUT $INPUT

Then chmod a+x ~/bin/combinepdf and then run it.