You (should) know that Pdftk is nothing more than a very old version of iText (a Java-PDF library) compiled with GCJ and extended with some command line functionality.
The keywords in the above statement are "VERY OLD".
$ java -classpath /path/to/Multivalent20091027.jar tool.pdf.Split -page 1 input.pdf Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: tool/pdf/Split Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: tool.pdf.Split at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306) at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247) Could not find the main class: tool.pdf.Split. Program will exit.
Turns out, this is a bit of a tricky software: even if it's on SourceForge, and says here that
Practical Thought generously provides these tools for free use on the command line
However, here it says:
The browser is open source. The document tools are a free bonus and not open source.
All releases of Multivalent linked from the official sourceforge site are missing the tools package.
(edit: there seems to be an old Multivalent version with the tools included, see the SO link; but as it looks somewhat like abandonware, I'd rather not use it)
Finally, I'd like to avoid tools that are essentially front ends for LaTeX like pdfjam.
Are there any options for such a PDF splitting command line tool under Linux?