Convert many .pdf to .txt file in a directory

Question

I have over a thousand files in a directory which I want to convert to text files. I use a code like the one below to first take out the spaces in the file names and then convert the files to text:

!/bin/bash

   find . -name '*.pdf' | while read file;
   do
    target=`echo "$file" | sed 's/ /_/g'`;
    echo "Renaming '$file' to '$target'";
    mv "$file" "$target";
    chmod 777 *.pdf;
    pdftotext -layout  "$target"  "$target.txt";
   done;

This code however converts a file like I love you.pdf to I_love_you.pdf.txt. I want to remove the .pdf part of the final file extension.

Answer 1

My preferred way of doing this is to use substitution to modify the extension:

pdftotext -layout "$target" "${target/%.pdf/.txt}"

The % there means to match only at the end of the string.

Answer 2

Your problem is this:

$target = "i_love_you.pdf"

therefore

$target.txt = "i_love_you.pdf.txt"

Note that if you don't supply the second parameter to pdftotext, it will by default convert file.pdf to file.txt, which seems perfect for your requirements.

Answer 3

Use 'basename' eg.

basename "i_love_you.pdf" ".pdf" returns "i_love_you"

See See How do I remove the file suffix and path portion from a path string in Bash?

Answer 4

Another option might be:

find ./ -name "*.pdf" -exec pdftotext {} \;