How to find spreadsheet files that contain a word

Question

Something like the answer here: https://superuser.com/questions/313187/search-text-in-multiple-excel-files but on linux mint..

xlsx files within a folder that contain the string

Answer 1

As a supplement to the linked answers in the comments.

Having had to search and recover a trashed file system full of un-backed up excel files this is a snippet of the script I used in a loop over several hundred large excel files to search for keywords. The filename is passed in as $f and the search string in $s. The middle line was just tidying up the output for my own purposes and you can probably throw it away.

found=$(unzip -p "$f" | grep -Pio -m 1 "$s" 2>/dev/null)
found=$(echo $found | sed 's/[ ,/]/./g')
echo "found $found in $f"

My advice is simply this ....don't forget -m 1 as an option to the grep to quit once you have found the first match or you will waste a lot of time.