Needle in a Haystack
Tutorials – odfgrep
What grep cannot accomplish with LibreOffice and OpenOffice documents, a small odfgrep script can.
If you have a lot of text files, slide shows, and spreadsheets on your computer, you will need, sooner or later, to know quickly which files contain certain words or sentences. You might also want to use that information to perform some other actions automatically, like sending email notifications or adding new records to a database. Sometimes, you can do this with the Recoll desktop search engine described in the previous issue of Linux Pro Magazine [1]. Should you, however, want something lighter or more flexible than Recoll, try odfgrep
: It not only might work better, but also teach you other, very efficient ways to manage all your office documents.
What and Why
A really basic knowledge of the command line and Bash syntax is helpful, but not mandatory: The code is short and explained as accurately as possible, to help you learn some basics of shell programming, if needed.
In fact, the hardest part of this whole tutorial may not be the code itself, but figuring out why you might want to learn and use it. In a nutshell, learning how to search or otherwise process ODF files from the command line, with odfgrep
or similar tools, can help you to become a much more productive desktop user, able to delegate to your computer many more otherwise very time-consuming tasks. That's it, really.
What Is grep?
The Unix world, to which Linux belongs, has been using and improving tools for automatic processing of plain text files for decades. The grep
command-line program is one of those tools and is one of the reasons why Linux is so great at text processing. By default the grep
utility searches for lines that match a given pattern in all the files passed to it and then prints the lines or counts the occurrences. The grep
options you are most likely to use are:
-c
(count): Print the number of lines matching the pattern.-l
(list): Print only the name of each input file that contains the pattern.-v
(invert match): Print only the lines that do not match the pattern.
All Hail ODF!
ODF is more than just a really open standard, which of course is an extremely important thing in and of itself. Compared with Microsoft Office file formats, or to almost any other format with comparable features, ODF is also very, very simple to analyze or generate automatically. In fact, as you can see in Figure 1, any ODF text, presentation, or spreadsheet is nothing but a ZIP archive of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) files, each with a predefined name and purpose, and pictures. XML is very verbose, but it is plain text, with tons of Free Software libraries, programs, and documentation to easily process it. At the end of this tutorial, for example, I include a link that contains my own little scripts for automatically generating ODF invoices or slide shows.
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
![Learn More](https://www.linux-magazine.com/var/linux_magazin/storage/images/media/linux-magazine-eng-us/images/misc/learn-more/834592-1-eng-US/Learn-More_medium.png)
News
-
NVIDIA Released Driver for Upcoming NVIDIA 560 GPU for Linux
Not only has NVIDIA released the driver for its upcoming CPU series, it's the first release that defaults to using open-source GPU kernel modules.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 24.07 Released
If you’re into rolling release Linux distributions, OpenMandriva ROME has a new snapshot with a new kernel.
-
Kernel 6.10 Available for General Usage
Linus Torvalds has released the 6.10 kernel and it includes significant performance increases for Intel Core hybrid systems and more.
-
TUXEDO Computers Releases InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen9 Laptop
Sporting either AMD or Intel CPUs, the TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 is an extremely compact, lightweight, sturdy powerhouse.
-
Google Extends Support for Linux Kernels Used for Android
Because the LTS Linux kernel releases are so important to Android, Google has decided to extend the support period beyond that offered by the kernel development team.
-
Linux Mint 22 Stable Delayed
If you're anxious about getting your hands on the stable release of Linux Mint 22, it looks as if you're going to have to wait a bit longer.
-
Nitrux 3.5.1 Available for Install
The latest version of the immutable, systemd-free distribution includes an updated kernel and NVIDIA driver.
-
Debian 12.6 Released with Plenty of Bug Fixes and Updates
The sixth update to Debian "Bookworm" is all about security mitigations and making adjustments for some "serious problems."
-
Canonical Offers 12-Year LTS for Open Source Docker Images
Canonical is expanding its LTS offering to reach beyond the DEB packages with a new distro-less Docker image.
-
Plasma Desktop 6.1 Released with Several Enhancements
If you're a fan of Plasma Desktop, you should be excited about this new point release.