How do I search a PDF file from command line?

bash_bob

I'm checking references of a paper and want to find the positions in the body where some paper (in the references list) is referenced. Is there a PDF editor which supports search via bash and extract the context of a position? I've tried to convert PDF to text, but didn't have a good result.

Originally asked by David on Stack Exchange (askubuntu) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

poppler-utils Note: xpdf-utils is a transitional package for poppler-utils. You can use poppler-utils . poppler-utils is a suite of tools for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. To install it you can use the Ubuntu Software Center or run sudo apt install poppler-utils : pdfgrep pdfgrep can search a string or a pattern in PDF files recursively in directory trees, counting matches or printing some context for each match. For example, to recursively ( -R ) search keyword in /some directory , case insensitive ( -i ): pdfgrep -Ri keyword /some/directory Pdfgrep is a tool to search text in PDF files. It works similar to grep . Features: search for regular expressions. support for some important...

Full answer by Mitch: https://askubuntu.stackexchange.com/a/184586 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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