Maybe OT - Grepping the locate command

[John McCabe-Dansted]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 6:46 PM, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> donn [2010-03-03 12:39 +0200]:
>> I would like to search through the *contents* of the files returned by
>> locate. So far I have not had much luck.
...
>  locate *.ods | xargs grep blah
>  ls | xargs cat
>
> will do what you want.

Only Donn also wants to unzip them, so we need something a bit longer like.
  locate *.ods | while read f ; do unzip -p $f | grep BLAH > /dev/null
&& echo $f ; done

(I've added the > /dev/null as the grep output on ods files tends to
be huge and ugly, it can be removed).

If this will be used regularly you can type:

function search_ods {
    locate *.ods | while read f; do
        unzip -p $f | grep --color=auto "$1" > /dev/null && echo $f;
    done
}

so that henceforth you can just type

search_ods BLAH

So that the search_ods function is automatically added to terminal
shells opened later you can append the above function to ~/.bashrc.

(To make this on topic, let me say "try that with CMD.EXE" ;)

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted