Search MS word files in a directory for specific content in Linux

Question

I have a directory structure full of MS word files and I have to search the directory for particular string. Until now I was using the following command to search files for in a directory

find . -exec grep -li 'search_string' {} \;

find . -name '*' -print | xargs grep 'search_string'

But, this search doesn't work for MS word files.

Is it possible to do string search in MS word files in Linux?

Answer 1

I'm a translator and know next to nothing about scripting but I was so pissed off about grep not being able to scan inside Word .doc files that I worked out how to make this little shell script to use catdoc and grep to search a directory of .doc files for a given input string.

You need to install catdocand docx2txt packages

#!/bin/bash
   echo -e "\n
Welcome to scandocs. This will search .doc AND .docx files in this directory for a given string. \n
Type in the text string you want to find... \n"
   read response
   find . -name "*.doc" | 
       while read i; do catdoc "$i" | 
                 grep --color=auto -iH --label="$i" "$response"; done
   find . -name "*.docx" | 
       while read i; do docx2txt < "$i" | 
                 grep --color=auto -iH --label="$i" "$response"; done

All improvements and suggestions welcome!

Answer 2

Here's a way to use "unzip" to print the entire contents to standard output, then pipe to "grep -q" to detect whether the desired string is present in the output. It works for docx format files.

#!/bin/bash
PROG=`basename $0`

if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
  echo "Usage: $PROG string file.docx [file.docx...]"
  exit 1
fi

findme="$1"
shift

for file in $@
do
  unzip -p "$file" | grep -q "$findme"
  [ $? -eq 0 ] && echo "$file"
done

Save the script as "inword" and search for "wombat" in three files with:

$ ./inword wombat file1.docx file2.docx file3.docx
file2.docx

Now you know file2.docx contains "wombat". You can get fancier by adding support for other grep options. Have fun.