NAME

       pdfgrep - search PDF files for a regular expression

SYNOPSIS

       pdfgrep [OPTION...] PATTERN [FILE...]
       pdfgrep [OPTION...] [-e PATTERN | -f FILE] [FILE...]

DESCRIPTION

       Search for PATTERN in each PDF FILE and print matching lines. By default, PATTERN is an extended regular
       expression.

       pdfgrep tries to be mostly compatible with GNU grep with some PDF-specific distinctions and additional
       options. Most notably, -n prints page instead of line numbers.

OPTIONS

   General Information
       --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.

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.

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.

FILES

       ${XDG_CACHE_HOME}/pdfgrep/*
           Cache files written and used when --cache is enabled. At most 200 cache entries older than a day are
           retained.

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!

BUGS

   Reporting Bugs
       Bugs can either be reportet to the mailing list (pdfgrep-users@pdfgrep.org) or to the bugtracker on
       gitlab (https://gitlab.com/pdfgrep/pdfgrep/issues).

AUTHORS

       pdfgrep is maintained by Hans-Peter Deifel.

       See the AUTHORS file in the source for a full list of contributors.

SEE ALSO

       grep(1), pcre(3), regex(7)

       See pdfgrep’s website https://pdfgrep.org for more information, downloads, git repository and more.