#  `delete`

Delete pages from an input PDF
## Usage
> pdftl `<input>` `delete` `<spec>...` `output` `<file>` `[<option...>]`

## Details
The `delete` operation is used to delete pages from one PDF.  This
operation is performed 'in-place' and the output PDF should retain all
essential features of the input except the missing pages. So if you
want to extract pages 1-5 of a PDF file, then it may be a good idea is
use this operation to delete pages `6-end` rather than using `cat`
(which would have to create a new PDF file from scratch and graft
pages 1-5 from the input file in, using all sorts of trickery).
## Examples

> Delete the first page
```
pdftl in.pdf delete 1 output out.pdf
```

> Keep only the first page (by deleting the others)
```
pdftl in.pdf delete '~1' output out.pdf
```


**Tags**: in_place, pages, delete

*Source: pdftl.operations.delete*

*Read online: [https://pdftl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/operations/delete.html](https://pdftl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/operations/delete.html)*

*Type: Operation*