OPTIONS¶
--help
Print a short summary of the options.
-V, --version
Show version information.
Pattern Interpretation¶
-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.
Matching Control¶
-e PATTERN, --regexp=PATTERN
Use PATTERN as the pattern to search for. If this
option is specified multiple times or combined with --file, all
patterns are tried in turn until one of them matches.
-f FILE, --file=FILE
Read patterns from FILE, one per line. If
FILE contains multiple patterns or if this option is applied multiple
times or combined with -e, all patterns are tried in turn until one of
them matches. An empty pattern list matches nothing.
-i, --ignore-case
Ignore case distinctions in both the PATTERN and
the input files.
General Output Control¶
-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. Implies -n.
--color WHEN
Surround file names, page numbers and matched text with
escape sequences to display them in color on the terminal.
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
(this is the default). |
-L, --files-without-match
Suppress normal output. Instead print the name of each
input file that doesn’t contain a match. This works well with
-Z, but many other output options like -n or -c are
ignored when -L is specified.
-l, --files-with-matches
Suppress normal output. Instead print the name of each
input file that contains a match. This works well with -Z, but many
other output options like -n or -c are ignored when -l is
specified.
-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.
-o, --only-matching
Print only the matched part of a line without any
surrounding context.
-q, --quiet
Suppress all normal output to stdout. Exit immediately
with exit status 0 if a match is found, even in case of errors. Use this if
you only care about the presence of matches, not their number or
content.
Line Prefix Control¶
-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.
-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.
Context Control¶
-A NUM, --after-context=NUM
Print NUM lines of context after matching lines.
Contiguous groups of matches are separated by a line containing --.
With -o, this option has no effect.
-B NUM, --before-context=NUM
Print NUM lines of context before matching lines.
Contiguous groups of matches are separated by a line containing --.
With -o, this option has no effect.
-C NUM, --context=NUM
Print NUM lines of context before and after
matching lines. Contiguous groups of matches are separated by a line
containing --. With -o, this option has no effect.
File Selection¶
-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.
Other Options¶
--cache
Use a cache for the rendered text to speed up the
operation on large files.
--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.
--page-range=RANGE
Limit search to a specified set of pages. RANGE is
a comma separated list of either a single page number or a range expression of
the form PAGE1-PAGE2. Example: 2-3,5,7-10.
--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.
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 PDFs in the current directory for
foo that also contain bar:
pdfgrep -Z --files-with-matches "bar" *.pdf | xargs -0 pdfgrep -H foo
Search all .pdf files that are smaller than 12M recursively in
the current directory:
find . -name "*.pdf" -size -12M -print0 | xargs -0 pdfgrep 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!