How to extract and/or remove the last page of a bunch of PDFs?

To further improve on @eldering's answer, pdftk version 1.45 and later have the means to reference pages in reverse order by prepending the lower-case letter r to the page number. The final page in a PDF is r1, the next-to-last page is r2, etc.

For example, the single pdftk call:

pdftk input.pdf cat 1-r2 output output.pdf

will drop the final page from input.pdf -- the input should be at least two pages long.

To extract just the final page of a PDF in order to test its filesize, run:

pdftk input.pdf cat r1 output final_page.pdf

Pdftk is available on Linux. Many distros have a binary you can install. You should make sure it is version 1.45 or later, though. If not, you can build pdftk from source code.

As @Daniel Andersson already commented, this can easily be done with pdftk:

pdftk input.pdf cat end-1 output temp.pdf
pdftk temp.pdf  cat end-2 output output.pdf
rm temp.pdf

I don't know if it can be done with one call to pdftk though...

Edit: you could combine it with thanosk's answer and use (in bash):

pdftk input.pdf cat 1-$((last-1)) output output.pdf

when you already extracted the last page to the variable $last.