How do I search recursively for a phrase in odt files

Question

I have a folder with subfolders in it and many libreoffice documents (.odt).

I need to find in which one there's a particular phrase.

I tried grep -ir "search phrase here" . but it only found the search phrase in an xml file.

Is there a way to search in documents that are not plain text files?

Answer 1

Finally, I resolved to using Recoll. It does a good job at finding information in files. Indexing is however slow and takes a lot of resources. This is not a problem if you do not run Recoll as a daemon, but only update the index manually when you're not using the computer.

To install it:

sudo apt install recoll

Answer 2

I have the similar problem with OpenDocument (ODT document, OTT template) and Microsoft Word (DOC and DOCX documents, DOT and DOTX templates) files.

Currently, I'm happy with the following Bash script for recursive search:

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then
    echo $"Usage: $(basename "$0") search_pattern"
    echo "You should have installed the following packages: odt2txt, docx2txt and libreoffice-writer"
    exit 1
fi

search_pattern="$1"
printf "Looking for: $search_pattern\n"

find . -name '*.odt' -o -name '*.ott' -o \
  -name '*.docx' -o -name '*.dotx' -o \
     -name '*.doc' -o -name '*.dot' \
     -type f | while read -r doc; do

    doc_fullfilename=$(basename -- "$doc")
    doc_filename="${doc_fullfilename%.*}"
    doc_filetype="${doc_fullfilename##*.}"

    case $doc_filetype in
        'odt' | 'ott')
        (odt2txt "$doc" 2>/dev/null | grep -i "$search_pattern") && echo "^ found in ODT/OTT: $doc" && echo
        ;;
        'docx' | 'dotx')
        (docx2txt "$doc" - 2>/dev/null | grep -i "$search_pattern") && echo "^ found in DOCX/DOTX: $doc" && echo
        ;;
        'doc'| 'dot')
        out_dir=/tmp
        lowriter --headless --convert-to txt:Text "$doc" --outdir "$out_dir" 2>&1 > /dev/null
        grep -i "$search_pattern" "$out_dir/$doc_filename.txt" && echo "^ found in DOC/DOT: $doc" && echo
        ;;
    esac
: ; done

It shows search results and file-names.

Notes:

1. the script uses three external programs - odt2txt (for ODT/OTT), docx2txt (for DOCX/DOTX), libreoffice-writer (for DOC/DOT).
2. theoretically, all these programs may be changed to only one - LibreOffice Writer, but it significantly slower for ODT/OTT and DOCX/DOTX.