Little known tool: pdfgrep

Grep is such an elegant linux tool, one that you might use from the command line in many different ways without even thinking about it. It’d be nice if non-plaintext file formats still worked with grep, e.g. pdf files.

While you can’t just grep pdf files as is, if you download a nice specialized tool called pdfgrep (http://pdfgrep.sourceforge.net/), then your command-line life might be much enriched. Perhaps down the road some extensible grep-like tool might exist that offers plugins for searching through other binary file formats (microsoft word, open office, etc.); or perhaps such a thing already exists and I’m merely ignorant of it?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>