PDFGREP(1)

NAME
pdfgrep - search pdf files for a regular expression

SYNOPSIS

pdfgrep [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.

-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.

-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. 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. It is also currently not possible to use individual passwords for different files.

-m, --max-count NUM
    Stop reading a file after NUM matching lines. When the -c or --count option is also used, pdfgrep does not output a count greater than NUM.

--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.

--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.

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 on pdfgrep.

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.

AUTHOR

Hans-Peter Deifel <hpdeifel at gmx.de>

SEE ALSO

grep(1), regex(7)