Allow numeric range to be omitted qpdf --pages

Detect a missing page range and assume 1-z.

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/manual/qpdf-manual.xml b/manual/qpdf-manual.xml
index ac0d32cc..b5748c24 100644
--- a/manual/qpdf-manual.xml
+++ b/manual/qpdf-manual.xml
@@ -614,7 +614,7 @@ make
     file is given as the primary input file is used as the starting
     point, but its pages are replaced with pages as specified.
 
-    <programlisting><option>--pages <replaceable>input-file</replaceable> [ <replaceable>--password=password</replaceable> ] <replaceable>page-range</replaceable> [ ... ] --</option>
+    <programlisting><option>--pages <replaceable>input-file</replaceable> [ <replaceable>--password=password</replaceable> ] [ <replaceable>page-range</replaceable> ] [ ... ] --</option>
 </programlisting>
     Multiple input files may be specified.  Each one is given as the
     name of the input file, an optional password (if required to open
@@ -636,6 +636,15 @@ make
     primary input.
    </para>
    <para>
+    Starting with qpdf 4.2.0, it is possible to omit the page range.
+    If qpdf sees a value in the place where it expects a page range
+    and that value is not a valid range but is a valid file name, qpdf
+    will implicitly use the range <literal>1-z</literal>, meaning that
+    it will include all pages in the file.  This makes it possible to
+    easily combine all pages in a set of files with a command like
+    <command>qpdf --empty out.pdf --pages *.pdf --</command>.
+   </para>
+   <para>
     It is not presently possible to specify the same page from the
     same file directly more than once, but you can make this work by
     specifying two different paths to the same file (such as by