I got a bunch of notes written by other students, but they are from an old textbook that didn't deal with everything in the same order, so I need to search through the notes for every chapter (each individual chapter is in a different .pdf or .doc) for "trace conditioning" for example.
I used to use Google Desktop for this, I have Launchy now and I told it to search pdfs, but it only searches the titles, not the content.
Thanks for any help.
Recoll is probably the most versatile document search engine you will find on Linux:
It supports a plethora of different formats and is very customizable.
For installation instructions and other pointers please check out this answer. The official documentation is very useful, too.
Install the package pdfgrep
sudo apt-get install pdfgrep
then use the command:
find /path -iname '*.pdf' -exec pdfgrep pattern {} +
Use DocFetcher, it is a native Linux application that indexes and searches through multiple document types.
I understand that Adobe Reader is proprietary software, but it has well designed Search in Files functionality (accessible from Edit->Search menu or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+F).
The Simple search window is shown below:
You need to set Where would you like to search? to All PDF Documents in and then select location from drop-down menu (Browse for Location).
You can enter search item to the What word or phrase would you like to search for? field and specify search options: Whole words only, Case-Sensitive, Include Bookmarks, Include Comments.
Advanced search is more configurable - see image below:
The search path is set in Look In.
Search item - in What word or phrase would you like to search for?.
Return results containing has options: Match Exact word or phrase, Match Any of the words, Match All of the words, Boolean query.
Other options include: Whole words only, Case-Sensetive, Proximity, Stemming, Include Bookmarks, Include Comments, Include Attachments.
Note: you can still install native Adobe Reader version 9.5.5 as described in other thread.
rga (or ripgrep-all) is a command line tool to recursively search all files in a directory for a regex pattern, that runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. It's a wrapper for ripgrep, the line-oriented recursive search program, on top of which it enables search in a multitude of file types like PDF, DOCX, ODT, EPUB, SQLite databases, movies subtitles embedded in MKV or MP4 files, archives like ZIP or GZ, and more.
There is a tool called PdfgrepGUI. You can get it at sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfgrepgui/ It is only a GUI for the cli tool pdfgrep.
