Search phrases in large number of pdf files

Because pdf's are compressed data you can't simply grep through them with the usual grep command. You can use strings on the file which prints all the ascii out of the file, but it's not guaranteed to work.

There are a number of open source apps out there that can be used, for instance a script using pdftotext would be easy to implement. pdftotext is a part of xpdf.

For OpenSuse 10.3 the rpm is below.

ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/repositories/home:/beyerle:/SLE10/SLE_10/i586/xpdf-tools-3.02-139.1.i586.rpm

Using pdftotext and a simple bash loop

for filename in `find /path/to/pdf_files/*.pdf`; do pdftotext $filename - | grep 'some value'; done

So you can understand what each part of the script does i've broken it down as well.

# get the paths to each file, and iterate through them storing each int he variable $filename
for filename in `find /path/to/pdf_files/*.pdf`; do 
 # run pdftotext on $filename, the '-' tells it to output to stdout, and then pass the data to grep
 pdftotext $filename - | grep 'some value'; 
done

What I do is utilize pdftotext.

One way is:

pdftotext datasheet.pdf -| grep sometext

If you have a large number of PDFs to go through, a simple script could be written to go through each PDF file.