PDFGREP(1) Pdfgrep Manual PDFGREP(1)NAMEpdfgrep - search pdf files for a regular expression
SYNOPSISpdfgrep [OPTION...] PATTERN [FILE...]
DESCRIPTION
Search for PATTERN in each FILE. PATTERN is an extended regular
expression.
pdfgrep works much like grep, with one distinction: It operates on
pages and not on lines.
OPTIONS-i, --ignore-case
Ignore case distinctions in both the PATTERN and the input files.
-F, --fixed-strings
Interpret PATTERN as a list of fixed strings separated by newlines,
any of which is to be matched.
-P, --perl-regexp
Interpret PATTERN as a Perl compatible regular expression (PCRE).
See pcresyntax(3) for a quick overview.
-H, --with-filename
Print the file name for each match. This is the default setting
when there is more than one file to search.
-h, --no-filename
Suppress the prefixing of file name on output. This is the default
setting when there is only one file to search.
-n, --page-number
Prefix each match with the number of the page where it was found.
-c, --count
Suppress normal output. Instead print the number of matches for
each input file. Note that unlike grep, multiple matches on the
same page will be counted individually.
-p, --page-count
Like -c, but prints the number of matches per page.
-C, --context NUM
Print at most INUM characters of context around each match. The
exact number will vary, because pdfgrep tries to respect word
boundaries. If NUM is "line", the whole line will be printed. If
this option is not set, pdfgrep tries to print lines that are not
longer than the terminal width.
--color WHEN
Surround file names, page numbers and matched text with escape
sequences to display them in color on the terminal. (The default
setting is auto). WHEN can be:
always
Always use colors, even when stdout is not a terminal.
never
Do not use colors.
auto
Use colors only when stdout is a terminal.
-o, --only-matching
Print only the matched part of a line without any surrounding
context.
-r, --recursive
Recursively search all files (restricted by --include and
--exclude) under each directory, following symlinks only if they
are on the command line.
-R, --dereference-recursive
Same as -r, but follows all symlinks.
--exclude=GLOB
Skip files whose base name matches GLOB. See glob(7) for wildcards
you can use. You can use this option multiple times to exclude more
patterns. It takes precedence over --include. Note, that in- and
excludes apply only to files found via --recursive and not to the
argument list.
--include=GLOB
Only search files whose base name matches GLOB. See --exclude for
details. The default is *.pdf.
--password=PASSWORD
Use PASSWORD to decrypt the PDF-files. Can be specified multiple
times; all passwords will be tried on all PDFs. Note that this
password will show up in your command history and the output of
ps(1). So please do not use this if the security of PASSWORD is
important.
-m, --max-count NUM
Stop reading a file after NUM matches. When the -c or --count
option is also used, pdfgrep does not output a count greater than
NUM.
-Z, --null
Output a null byte (called NUL in ASCII and '\0' in C) instead of
the colon that usually separates a filename from the rest of the
line. This option makes the output unambiguous in the presence of
colons, spaces or newlines in the filename. It can be used in
conjunction with commands such as xargs -0 or perl -0.
--match-prefix-separator SEP
Changes the colon used to separate filename, line number and text
in the output to SEP, which can be an arbitrary string. This is
useful when filenames contain colons, but only for interactive
usage. For scripting, --null should be used.
--debug
Enable debug output. Note: Due to limitations of poppler before
version 0.30.0, some debug output is also printed without --debug
when using such a poppler version.
--warn-empty
Print a warning to stderr if a PDF contains no searchable text.
This is the case for PDFs that consist only of images, for example
scanned documents.
--unac
Remove accents and ligatures from both the search pattern and the
PDF documents. This is useful if you want to search for a word
containing "ae", but the PDF uses the single character "æ" instead.
See unac(3) and unaccent(1) for details.
This option is experimental and only available if pdfgrep is
compiled with unac support.
-q, --quiet
Suppress all normal output to stdout. Errors will be printed and
the exit codes will be returned (see below).
--help
Print a short summary of the options.
-V, --version Show version information.
EXIT STATUS
Normally, the exit status is 0 if at least one match is found, 1 if no
match is found and 2 if an error occurred. But if the --quiet or -q
option is used and a match was found, pdfgrep will return 0 regardless
of errors.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
The behavior of pdfgrep is affected by the following environment
variable.
GREP_COLORS
Specifies the colors and other attributes used to highlight various
parts of the output. The syntax and values are like GREP_COLORS of
grep. See grep(1) for more details. Currently only the capabilities
mt, ms, mc, fn, ln and se are used by pdfgrep, where mt, ms and mc
have the same effect.
EXAMPLES
Print the first ten lines matching pattern and print their page number
pdfgrep-n --max-count 10 pattern foo.pdf
Search all .pdf files whose names begin with foo recursively in the
current directory
pdfgrep-r --include "foo*.pdf" pattern
Search all .pdf files that are smaller than 12M recursively in the
current directory
find . -name "*.pdf" -size -12M -print0 | xargs -0pdfgrep pattern
Note that in contrast to the previous examples, this task could not
be solved with pdfgrep alone, but the Unix tools find(1) and
xargs(1) had to be used. That’s because pdfgrep itself doesn’t
include options to exclude files by their size. But as you see, it
doesn’t have to!
BUGS
Reporting Bugs
Bugs can either be reportet to the mailing list
(pdfgrep-users@pdfgrep.org) or to the bugtracker on gitlab
(https://gitlab.com/pdfgrep/pdfgrep/issues).
Known Bugs
pdfgrep prints a single line multiple times, if there is more than one
match in that line. That doesn’t mirror to the behavior of grep.
Also, the current context options don’t have the same semantics as the
grep ones.
AUTHORSpdfgrep is maintained by Hans-Peter Deifel.
See the AUTHORS file in the source for a full list of contributors.
SEE ALSOgrep(1), pcre(3), regex(7)
See pdfgrep’s website https://pdfgrep.org for more information,
downloads, git repository and more.
Pdfgrep 1.4.1 09/26/2015 PDFGREP(1)
