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Search within pdf files using grep

By David On Laptop ⋅ November 25, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Put this code snippet into a script named greppdf into your path :

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#!/bin/bash

for PDF in *.pdf
do
    NB_PAGES=`pdfinfo "$PDF" |grep "Pages" |cut -f 2 -d ":"`

    for (( PAGE=1; PAGE<=$NB_PAGES; PAGE++ ))
    do  
        pdftotext "$PDF" -f $PAGE -l $PAGE - | grep -i $@ | while read line; do echo "$PDF:$PAGE:$line"; done
    done
done

Now you can search through a directory of pdf, using this command (you can use as well regular grep parameters) :

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greppdf "programming"

This will output the filename and slide number where the “programming” string is found.

Requirements: The package poppler-utils needs to be installed on your system.

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