I can accomplish this in imagemagick with a command like magick Page*.svg out.pdf but that comes out as a raster i know inksxape can convert individual svgs to pdfs via commandline but it would be nice if I could make just one from many

Hi @florpglorp,

Definitly not a beginner's question ;)

For now, Inkscape doesn't seems to have a batch import function, except the PDF multipages import, so it's not possible to merge multiple SVG in a single multipages SVG by command line.

In alternative, you can achieve it in 2-steps > convert each single SVG in PDF then merge all PDF with a third-part software :

 - This article mentions a way with 'Poppler' : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2507766/merge-convert-multiple-pdf-files-into-one-pdf#11280219
As Poppler is one of the methods to import PDF, I suppose it is embedded in the Inkscape installation.

 - PDFSAM, which seems to have command line options : https://pdfsam.org/faq/

Hope it will help.

Thanks @m1981, i ended up using pdfunite which comes part of poppler. Its one extra step and a bunch of intermediate files but it works.