Re: [Help-bash] script help please

[Greg Wooledge]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 10:38:27AM -0400, Randy wrote:
>    There is a command I use frequently:
>    find *.pdf -exec sh -c 'pdftotext "{}" - | grep --with-filename
>    --label="{}" --color "XXXX"' \;

Note that this does not actually recurse.  It only "finds" PDF files
in the current directory.

You also have potential code injection exploits here, if it is run in
a directory that has malicious filenames.  It's not safe to embed the
{} directly inside a shell script.  The filenames will become part of
the script.

>    (where "XXXX" is the text for which I am search PDF files.)
>    I tried to write a script, where I could simply pass-in ($1) the
>    string.  Could not make it work.

# Usage: pdfgrep searchtext
pdfgrep() {
    find . -type f -name '*.pdf' -exec sh -c '
        pdftotext "$2" - |
        grep -F --with-filename --label="$2" --color "$1"
    ' _ "$1" {} \;
}

That version recurses.  You're apparently using some GNU utilities, so
if you didn't actually want the recursion, you could add a -maxdepth
option.