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Category: Computer Tricks • Linux • OpenSource • Technology
Posted on: June 14, 2009 4:29 PM, by Greg Laden
OK, I'm going to do this without looking. It will be something like pdftotext foo | grep whatever, right?
Let's watch and see....
Well, close enough. Note that that was not being done on a Debian system. For Debian (like Ubuntu) you would use apt to install the tools.
apt-get install poppler-utils
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Comments
Or xpdf-utils, Poppler being a fork of Xpdf.
Posted by: Barry | June 14, 2009 7:47 PM
Wouldn't it just be easier to open the pdf and search for the phrase? Then you'd know the context as well as the location of the string. I'm sympathetic to the wonders of the command line, but this looks like a fair amount of work.
Posted by: richard | June 14, 2009 9:13 PM
richard, suppose you are searching through 1000 pdf's of articles you snagged over the last few years? This can be a batch operation over many files this way.
Posted by: Markk | June 14, 2009 10:46 PM
Oh, gosh, you linux-people are a never ending source of mirth :-)
Posted by: Michael Spencer | June 15, 2009 7:03 AM