pdfgrep

Overview

pdfgrep is a tool to search text in PDF files. It works similarly to grep.

Features

• Grep compatible: pdfgrep tries to be compatible with GNU grep, where it makes sense. Many of your favorite grep options are supported (such as -r, -i, -n or -c).
• Search many PDFs at once, even recursively in directories
• Regular expressions: Posix or PCRE
• Colored output
• Support for password protected PDFs

For a complete documentation, please consult the manpage.

Example

$ pdfgrep --max-count 1 --context 1 --with-filename --page-number pattern rabin-karp.pdf
rabin-karp.pdf-1-randomized
rabin-karp.pdf:1:pattern-matching
rabin-karp.pdf-1-algorithms

Dependencies

• poppler-cpp (poppler >= 0.14) (http://poppler.freedesktop.org/)
• libgcrypt (https://www.gnu.org/software/libgcrypt/)
• optionally libpcre2 (http://www.pcre.org/)

Building

To build pdfgrep, use the standard procedure:

./configure
make
sudo make install

If you're using the git version, you will also have to run ./autogen.sh in advance.

Depending on your OS, you need to have -dev or -devel packages installed for all dependencies.

The ./configure script can take lots of options to customize the build process, the most important of which are:

• --with-unac: Build with experimental libunac support and add the --unac flag to pdfgrep that strips all accents from characters, making it possible to find the character 'ä' by searching 'a'.
• --with-{zsh,bash}-completion: Configure installation directory for shell completion files.
• --without-libpcre: Disable support for perl compatible regular expressions.
• --disable-doc: Disable manpage generation.

To uninstall, run sudo make uninstall.

See configure --help for more info or read the (very extensive) INSTALL file in the source.

Download

Tarballs for releases are available at https://pdfgrep.org/download.html

The development version is available as a git repository at https://gitlab.com/pdfgrep/pdfgrep

Contact

General questions, suggestions, bug reports, patches or anything else can be sent to the mailinglist.

You can also use the issue tracker for bug reports or create a merge request on GitLab, if you prefer that over mailinglists.