¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Problem statement: grep¹ for a given string in a multitude of multi-page PDF files:

% du -sh very_large_file.zip
513M    very_large_file.zip

% unzip very_large_file.zip
[...]

% ls -1 *.pdf | wc -l
6816

There’s a tool called ripgrep-all (short: rga) that is perfect for that. And yes, it resembles our good ol' ripgrep (short: rg).

It is widely available in most package managers.

I install it with homebrew:

% brew install ripgrep-all  # or rga

Upon running it with:

% rga -i "perrotta"

…it did not initially work. pdftotext is a required dependency that was missing.

Where can we obtain pdftotext?

% brew which-formula pdftotext
pdf2image
poppler
poppler-qt5
xpdf

I installed poppler, as it is quite well-known in the Linux world.

The search works as expected afterwards:

% rga -i perrotta
my_cool_file_000.pdf
Page 12: HELLO PERROTTA GOODBYE

my_cool_file_001.pdf
Page 123: SERVUS PERROTTA CIAO