Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[rikona]

On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 17:32:48 +0100
Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 01:51:12PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> > > 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...
> >   
> ??? Ay?  Plain text is *way* more compact than other ways of storing
> the data surely. Even the largest books (e.g. the whole of Harry
> Potter or the Bible) are only around a million words so, at the very
> most, I'd guess just 10Mb.

Agreed. In the past, when storage was small and very expensive, I spent
a lot of effort converting things to text so I could search them
easily. Now, though, costs are way down and tools are much better at
nontext stuff so I rarely do that anymore.