mjhjmtu

Hopefully somebody can help me out with this,

I'm looking for a small script which does a keyword search in a PDF file (actually a folder of PDF files), and it needs to return all pages including the name of the file, where the keyword is found.

I have found the following script (over here https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1368062):

#!/bin/bash

[ "$*" ] || echo "You forgot a search string!" ; exit 1 ; 

found=1

for file in ./src/*.pdf ; do
 [ "$file" = '*.pdf' ] && echo "No PDF files found!" && exit 1
 pages=$(pdfinfo "$file" | awk '/Pages:/ print $NF ')
 for ((i=1 ; i<=$pages ; i++)) ; do
 match=$(pdftotext -q -f $i -l $i "$file" - | grep -m 1 "$*")
 [ "$match" ] && echo "Page $i in $file" && found=0
 done
done

[ "$found" -ne 0 ] && echo "No search string matches found"

It does return most of the hits, but still, the search functionality inside Adobe Acrobat Reader and Mac Preview does return way more matches. Anyone who recognises what might be the problem?

My guess is it fails on a character before and/or after the search keyword, but that's just a guess .

If it includes the number of matches per page, it's truly perfect!

I would use pdfgrep:

pdfgrep -p "your search string" src/*.pdf

will output the matching page numbers, with a count per page.

This might not deal with the missing matches; the reasons for those depend on the way the PDFs are constructed (in particular, how the text is assembled).