Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[Chris Green]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 12:40:00PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> 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.
> 
For doing stuff like this use a file format that is easily searched! :-)

Do the files *really* need all that layout and formatting?  You can
get pretty good results using any of various markup languages, many
used by Wikis and such, and they're easy to search using grep.

-- 
Chris Green