How to search contents of multiple pdf files?

Question

How could I search the contents of PDF files in a directory/subdirectory? I am looking for some command line tools. It seems that grep can\'t search PDF files.<

Answer 1

First convert all your pdf files to text files:

for file in *.pdf;do pdftotext "$file"; done

Then use grep as normal. This is especially good as it is fast when you have multiple queries and a lot of PDF files.