I was trying to do that but I noticed ls | grep searchterm just searches the book TITLES for searchterm. Is this possible, to search the text of ebooks?

  • Hellfire103English
    4•13 hours ago

    Sounds like a good time to mention that “Little Brother” by Cory Doctorow is available in GNU Info format (usually used for manpages).

  • sylver_dragonEnglish
    3•16 hours ago

    It’s going to be different for different file formats. For example, something like epub is going to be hard because the format is really just a zip file with a specific internal file structure. So, it’s not really the .epub file you want to grep, but one of the files within that zip file you want to grep through. EBooks stored as PDFs could be a bit easier, as they are a monolithic file format with text often (though not always) stored just as plain text. However, the text streams can be encrypted and/or compressed (FlateDecode); so, there is no guarantee of seeing plain text.

    I’m sure there are more formats, but I think you get the idea, how you would do a string search comes down to the actual file format. And some are not going to be easily greppable. It’s not impossible, just not straight forward.

  • @[email protected]English
    6•21 hours ago

    ls lists files, if you pipe it to grep it will print matching lines with file names. Universally you can’t grep through ebook content, but you can do it with epub, probably other zipped text formats using zipgrep or just unzipthem and grep unarchived files.

        • @[email protected]OPEnglish
          1•2 hours ago

          This tool is very powerful! Just what I needed, thanks again. Turns out you need pandoc 3+ and linux mint repo has 2.9, so after upgrading that rga started working, but it still throws this error from time to time:

          
parseSpine
Error: copying adapter output to stdout

Caused by:
    0: subprocess: Command { std: "pandoc" "--from=epub" "--to=plain" "--wrap=none" "--markdown-headings=atx", kill_on_drop: false }
    1: ExitStatus(unix_wait_status(16384))

          I will have to keep looking into it, I’m not sure if this error stops the search in it’s tracks.

  • @JASN_DE
    4•21 hours ago

    Yeah, that’s to be expected with ls as it only lists the folder contents. Which format do you have?