Maybe OT - Grepping the locate command

[donn]

Hi, I shall make this on-topic by saying something flameworthy like 
"stupid UBUNTU locate command!" :) Anyhoo, here's the thing that's 
puzzling me:

I would like to search through the *contents* of the files returned by 
locate. So far I have not had much luck.

locate *.ods | grep blah
(No good because it greps the filenames, not their contents)

locate *.ods | strings | grep blah
(I thought this one would work, but strings is only repeating the 
filenames sent by locate)

Oddly, ls suffers a similar fate:
ls | cat
(I expected a long cat of all the files listed. I got the same as ls on 
its own. I am sure I am missing something basic here.)

So, at this point I headed for wilder territory ending up with a for f 
in `locate ... kind of affair. Horrible and has issues with long filenames.
Eventually I gave-up and used find:
find . -name "*.ods" -exec strings {} \;| grep BLAH

Only to discover that ods files are zipped! Argh.

That aside; I like the locate command because it's a nice wide net that 
does not need a starting path -- anyone have some idea how its results 
could be turned into actual files and opened/catted/grepped etc?

\d
-- 
Fonty Python and Things! -- http://otherwise.relics.co.za/wiki/Software