pdfgrep ☆
« Back to VersTracker
Description:
Search PDFs for strings matching a regular expression
Type: Formula  |  Tracked Since: Dec 28, 2025
Links: Homepage  |  formulae.brew.sh
Category: Developer tools
Tags: pdf search cli regex text-processing
Install: brew install pdfgrep
About:
Pdfgrep is a command-line utility designed to search inside PDF documents for text that matches a specified regular expression. It efficiently extracts matching lines or metadata without requiring the PDFs to be converted to other formats first. This tool is essential for users managing large archives of PDFs who need to quickly locate specific information within them.
Key Features:
  • Supports standard PCRE regular expressions for complex pattern matching
  • Outputs matching text directly to the console or to files
  • Recursively searches directories of PDF files
  • Optionally extracts context lines around matches
Use Cases:
  • Searching through large collections of academic papers or documentation
  • Filtering log files or reports that are archived as PDFs
  • Locating specific contract clauses in a folder of legal documents
Alternatives:
  • mutool – Part of MuPDF, offers text extraction but is a heavier suite of tools
  • pdftotext (poppler) – Converts PDF to text for piping to grep, less efficient for direct searching
Version History
Detected Version Rev Change Commit
Jan 9, 2026 9:46am 3 REVISION_ONLY 2c2d6254
Sep 16, 2025 12:54pm 2 VERSION_BUMP 8cac3496
Jan 3, 2025 9:36am 2 VERSION_BUMP e22bffd8
Nov 25, 2024 8:59am 1 VERSION_BUMP 6780cbb1
Nov 9, 2024 5:56am 1 VERSION_BUMP 843bff9f
Nov 8, 2024 9:07am 1 VERSION_BUMP 08373af6
Sep 12, 2024 3:07pm 0 VERSION_BUMP 33ce4d6a
« Back to VersTracker  |  Browse Packages  |  About