Open several PDFs from Terminal
If you want to just open a list of PDFs all at once, you just need to separate the file names (enclosed with quotes) by a space as follows:

open "file1.pdf" "file2.pdf" ... "fileN.pdf"


This will open every PDF specified on one line.

If you want to open every PDF in a particular directory, use the command (simple for/do loop):

for file in /Path_to_Directory/*.pdf; do open "${file}"; done


Both of the examples above use the default app associated with the file (Preview).  If you want to specify a particular app (maybe you have a different PDF viewer but want to use Preview) use the -a flag and specify the app:

for file in /Path_to_Directory/*.pdf; do open -a Preview.app "${file}";  done


Note:  Be sure to enclose the variable name in quotes (") to account for spaces and non-printing characters.  For example, if you have a file named "My PDF File.pdf", not including the quotes will cause the command to try and open each string ("My", "PDF", and "File") as separate files.