Recursively grep through epub files

Question

I tried the answers here, but without luck.

find . -name "*.epub" -exec zipgrep pattern {} \;

showed me "matched", but didn't give me the matching epub file back. Also, it returned huge blobs of data, which were hard to grep through.

grep -a didn't work at all.

I want something like grep -R but for epub files.

Answer 1

This will give you the full path to all the *.epub files.

find / -name *.epub -exec ls {} \; 2>/dev/null

If you want to store that ouput in a list:

find / -name *.epub -exec ls {} \; 2>/dev/null >> /tmp/list

If you want to search that list for a string I would use a for loop. If you are getting huge blobs of data it may see them as one long line. this will print the patter and the 5 char before and after.

for i in `cat /tmp/list` ; do echo $i ; grep -a -o -p '.{0,5}pattern.{0,5}' ; done

Answer 2

I would use:

find . -name '*.epub'  -exec zipgrep -q {pattern} {} \; -print

• -q suppresses the display of hits
• since zipgrep returns 0 only if it finds a match, the -exec zipgrep ... acts as a filter, so the -print is only executed if there was a match (in case you need it, it can be another -exec that will only be executed on the matching files).