Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 at 13:11, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:

> No fewer than three people provided essentially the same tools to do
> exactly what you say cannot be done.

I didn't say it could not be done. I said it would be ludicrously slow.

I have 12GB of data in my Dropbox. Any search involving file
conversions would be unusable. My typical grep search workflow is:

grep -r "phrase I am looking for" *
grep -r "phrase i am looking for" *
grep -r "phrase for which I am looking" *
grep -r "phrase for which i am looking" *
grep -r "totally different phrase" *

Doing that across a few thousand files totalling 12GB when each file
must be converted... No, forget about it. Not going to fly.

I would walk to another room, wake my Mac, tap cmd-space "phrase I'm
looking for" and before I sat down I'd be looking at a list of partial
matches.

> While it is true that grep only searches plain text, the guts of these
> files can in general be converted to plain text relatively easily,
> allowing grep to search them.

I do not know if you are aware of this but cloud storage services like
this charge by the amount stored. Keeping plain-text copies of
everything could be very expensive, and increases search time, and
also brings in a whole new set of issues around keeping binary-file
contents synchronised with text-file contents...

Again, no. In my considered opinion, trying to attack this problem
with conversions is completely the wrong approach and will not bring
any good satisfying resolution, ever, under any circumstances.

> Two tools mentioned, AbiWord and LibreOffice - allow doc files to be
> converted to other formats which can then be searched.

Once again for the gallery: *conversion is not the answer here.*

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