The Problem

It seems like it should be really easy to search for text content in documents (i.e., not text files but files like *.odt). Unfortunately, it’s not.

This means that, even though I’m quite sure “I wrote something about that somewhere,” I can’t find it. This is a great reason to use .md files and write in plaintext. Then the solution would just be: use grep. But that’s not going to work when you’re writing more complicated content that has lots of footnotes and custom layouts and things (although I have seriously considered .tex).

The Solution

Fortunately, .od* files are basically just archived .xml files. This means that you can actually unzip them and get your content. So if you wanted to grep .odt files, you might write a function something like this:

#!/bin/bash

find . -type f -name "*.od*" | while read i ; do
    [ "$1" ] || { echo "You forgot search string!" ; exit 1 ; }
    unzip -ca "$i" 2>/dev/null | grep -iq "$*"
    if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then
        echo "string found in $i" | nl
    fi
done

source: https://askubuntu.com/a/938914

When I ran this, I modified the script to only search files whose names match *.odt (not *.od*), but that’s not required.

And now:

~/ $ sh ./search-libre.sh "my search term"
string found in ./

Searching for Text in Documents

Grep your .odt files

The Problem

The Solution