GREP a PDF file.

pdftotext [file] - | grep 'YourPattern'

PDF files are simultaneously wonderful and heinous. They are wonderful in being ubiquitous and mostly being cross platform. They are heinous in being very difficult to work with from the command line, search, grep, use only the text inside the PDF, or use outside of proprietary products. xpdf is a wonderful set of PDF tools. It is on many linux distros and can be installed on OS X. While primarily an open PDF viewer for X, xpdf has the tool "pdftotext" that can extract formated or unformatted text from inside a PDF that has text. This text stream can then be further processed by grep or other tool. The '-' after the file name directs output to stdout rather than to a text file the same name as the PDF. Make sure you use version 3.02 of pdftotext or later; earlier versions clipped lines. The lines extracted from a PDF without the "-layout" option are very long. More paragraphs. Use just to test that a pattern exists in the file. With "-layout" the output resembles the lines, but it is not perfect. xpdf is available open source at http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

By: drewk

2010-02-14 21:42:35

grep pipe grep pdf

3 Alternatives + Submit Alt

GREP a PDF file.

This is a good alternative to pdf2text for Ubuntu. To install it: sudo apt-get install python-pdfminer
This is sample output - yours may be different.
2

pdf2txt myfile.pdf | grep mypattern

grinob · 2015-11-23 17:46:22 9
GREP a PDF file.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

grep -i '[^script$]' 1.txt

vinod · 2010-10-20 12:17:04 3
GREP a PDF file.

grep pdf files easily
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

pdfgrep pattern /the/path

ees · 2017-02-02 09:27:43 19

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What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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