man pdfgrep

Ignore case distinctions in both the PATTERN and the input files.

Interpret PATTERN as a list of fixed strings separated by newlines, any of which is to be matched.

Interpret PATTERN as a Perl compatible regular expression (PCRE). See pcresyntax(3) for a quick overview.

Print the file name for each match. This is the default setting when there is more than one file to search.

Suppress the prefixing of file name on output. This is the default setting when there is only one file to search.

Prefix each match with the number of the page where it was found.

Suppress normal output. Instead print the number of matches for each input file. Note that unlike grep, multiple matches on the same page will be counted individually.

Like -c, but prints the number of matches per page.

Print at most INUM characters of context around each match. The exact number will vary, because pdfgrep tries to respect word boundaries. If NUM is "line", the whole line will be printed. If this option is not set, pdfgrep tries to print lines that are not longer than the terminal width.

Surround file names, page numbers and matched text with escape sequences to display them in color on the terminal. (The default setting is auto). WHEN can be:

Print only the matched part of a line without any surrounding context.

Recursively search all files (restricted by --include and --exclude) under each directory, following symlinks only if they are on the command line.

Same as -r, but follows all symlinks.

Skip files whose base name matches GLOB. See glob(7) for wildcards you can use. You can use this option multiple times to exclude more patterns. It takes precedence over --include. Note, that in- and excludes apply only to files found via --recursive and not to the argument list.

Only search files whose base name matches GLOB. See --exclude for details. The default is *.pdf.

Use PASSWORD to decrypt the PDF-files. Can be specified multiple times; all passwords will be tried on all PDFs. Note that this password will show up in your command history and the output of ps(1). So please do not use this if the security of PASSWORD is important.

Stop reading a file after NUM matches. When the -c or --count option is also used, pdfgrep does not output a count greater than NUM.

Output a null byte (called NUL in ASCII and '\0' in C) instead of the colon that usually separates a filename from the rest of the line. This option makes the output unambiguous in the presence of colons, spaces or newlines in the filename. It can be used in conjunction with commands such as xargs -0 or perl -0.

Changes the colon used to separate filename, line number and text in the output to SEP, which can be an arbitrary string. This is useful when filenames contain colons, but only for interactive usage. For scripting, --null should be used.

Enable debug output. Note: Due to limitations of poppler before version 0.30.0, some debug output is also printed without --debug when using such a poppler version.

Print a warning to stderr if a PDF contains no searchable text. This is the case for PDFs that consist only of images, for example scanned documents.

Remove accents and ligatures from both the search pattern and the PDF documents. This is useful if you want to search for a word containing "ae", but the PDF uses the single character "æ" instead. See unac(3) and unaccent(1) for details.

Suppress all normal output to stdout. Errors will be printed and the exit codes will be returned (see below).

Print a short summary of the options.

Specifies the colors and other attributes used to highlight various parts of the output. The syntax and values are like GREP_COLORS of grep. See grep(1) for more details. Currently only the capabilities mt, ms, mc, fn, ln and se are used by pdfgrep, where mt, ms and mc have the same effect.