How to search contents of multiple pdf files?

linux pdf full-text-search grep debian
Jestin Joy picture Jestin Joy · Jan 10, 2011 · Viewed 109.7k times · Source

How could I search the contents of PDF files in a directory/subdirectory? I am looking for some command line tools. It seems that grep can't search PDF files.

Answer

Graeme picture Graeme · Mar 25, 2011

There is pdfgrep, which does exactly what its name suggests. 

pdfgrep -R 'a pattern to search recursively from path' /some/path

I've used it for simple searches and it worked fine.

(There are packages in Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora.)

Since version 1.3.0 pdfgrep supports recursive search. This version is available in Ubuntu since Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal).

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