Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[rikona]

On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 12:40:00 +0200
Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> 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.

Recoll DOES work - quite well - that's why I suggested it. I worked
with the developer years back to include some sophisticated search
techniques. It's an excellent tool, IMHO. In doing an update, Recoll
says it has indexed about 700,000 "items", probably approaching 1 Tb.
I can find multi-word combos, in dozens of different kinds of files,
including coded files, in seconds - far easier and faster than anything
discussed in this thread. I use it multiple times every day - one of my
most useful tools. 

Had he installed it, it is likely he would have found the word some time
ago. :-)

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

What comparable tools are on the Mac? I have an interest in top-notch
search tools.

Rik