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Is there a way to search pdf files using the power of grep, without converting to text first in Ubuntu?

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I think you need to parse it thou pdf2text in order to get some usable results back... – Johan Jan 31 '11 at 14:29
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7 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted

If you have poppler-utils installed (default on Ubuntu Desktop), you could "convert" it on the fly and pipe it to grep:

pdftotext my.pdf - | grep 'pattern'

This won't create a .txt file.

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so .. you extract the text before you grep it which means the answer is "no". – akira Jan 31 '11 at 15:18
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@akira The OP probably meant "without opening the PDF in a viewer and exporting to text" – Michael Mrozek♦ Jan 31 '11 at 17:36
@Michael Mrozek: then that should be clarified by OP, but "grep only" is pretty clear to me. – akira Jan 31 '11 at 18:38
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@akira Where do you see "grep only"? – Michael Mrozek♦ Jan 31 '11 at 18:55
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@akira Well, I already said what I think he probably meant; he doesn't want to export to text before processing it. I very much doubt he has a problem with any command that converts to text in any way; there's no reason not to – Michael Mrozek♦ Feb 1 '11 at 5:52
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up vote 8 down vote

Install the package pdfgrep, then use the command:

find /path -iname '*.pdf' -exec pdfgrep pattern {} +
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up vote 2 down vote

You could pipe it through strings first:-

cat file.pdf | strings | grep <...etc...>
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Just use strings file.pdf | grep <...>, you don't need cat – phunehehe Jan 31 '11 at 14:31
Yeah - my mind seems to work better with streams... :-) – Andy Smith Jan 31 '11 at 14:57
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wont work if text is compressed, which it is most of the times. – akira Jan 31 '11 at 15:18
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Even if the text is uncompressed, it's generally small pieces of sentences (not even necessarily whole words!) finely intermixed with formatting information. Not very friendly for strings or grep. – Jander Jan 31 '11 at 16:08
up vote 2 down vote

No.

A pdf consists of chunks of data, some of them text, some of them pictures and some of them really magical fancy XYZ (eg. .u3d files). Those chunks are most of the times compressed (eg. flat, check http://www.verypdf.com/pdfinfoeditor/compression.htm). In order to 'grep' a .pdf you have to reverse the compression aka extract the text.

You can do that either per file with tools such as pdf2text and grep the result, or you run an 'indexer' (look at xapian.org or lucene) which builds an searchable index out of your .pdf files and then you can use the search engine tools of that indexer to get the content of the pdf.

But no, you can not grep pdf files and hope for reliable answers without extracting the text first.

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up vote 2 down vote

Recoll can search PDFs. It doesn't support regular expressions, but it has lots of other search options, so it might fit your needs.

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up vote 1 down vote

try this 

find /path -iname *.pdf -print0 | for i in `xargs 0`; do echo $i; \
    pdftotext "$i" - | grep pattern; done

for printing the lines the pattern occurs inside the pdf

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up vote 0 down vote

gpdf might be what you need if you're using Gnome! Check this in case you're not using Gnome. It's got a list of CLI pdf viewers. Then you can use grep to find some pattern.

Hope that helps.

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