Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, 14 Jun 2020 at 09:56, Pat Brown <pat.mysterywriter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've tried a variety of grep commands but I can't find the specific
> word I'm searching for that is in a file or files somewhere in my
> Dropbox folder. The word I'm trying to find is Blowback. Can someone
> please help me with the correct command?

[Reading down the thread]

They are files from proprietary Windows/Mac apps?

Then you can't. Grep only searches plain text.

You can't search in proprietary binary files. At all. Forget all the
ideas about converting them; you cannot efficiently convert or filter
these -- every file would need to be converted every time, which would
be _ludicrously_ slow.

You need a desktop search tool. There are not many for Linux and in my
experience they do not work well. I recently tried Catfish and it was
unable to search inside LibreOffice files.

Recoll might work; I have not tried it properly.

For doing stuff like this, a Mac is a better tool.


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