rgpipe is a single bash/sh script and an alias to use with ripgrep to search through a myriad of file types that are otherwise not grep friendly. Use it with ripgrep's -pre command which allows ripgrep to selectively process files before searching.

The most basic usage is to point rgpipe at some file, and it will attempt to print the contents of said file to stdout.

rgpipe MyFancyExcelFile.xlsx

The more involved usage is as a filter in front of ripgrep to systematically attempt to grep through the contents of assorted non-text files much as you would text files. The basic incantation looks like:

rg --pre-glob '*.{xlsx,pptx,docx,pdf}' --pre rgpipe "$YourSearchTermHere"

I wrote up an extended gist about how to use it here

That gist is only useful because of the kind note by BurntSushi in this hacker news comment explaining how rg --pre-glob works.

This helps grep through:

• New MS Office files (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, variants thereof)
  • Uses unzip and sed
• Old MS Office files (DOC, PPT, XLS, variants thereof) & new excel binary format
  • Uses strings
• LibreOffice files (ODS, ODT, ODP)
  • Uses unzip and sed
• PDF
  • Uses pdftottext from poppler
• Web/structured formats (HTML, XHTML ...)
  • Uses w3m lynx and friends also works. Not 100% necessary.
• Web formats disguised as books (chm, epub)
  • unzip and w3m for EPUB
  • 7zip and w3m for chm

Ubuntu wants: sudo apt install poppler-utils p7zip w3m unzip

termux wants: pkg install poppler p7zip w3m

Assuming rgpipe is in path, use /path/to/rgpipe if it's not

rg --pre rgpipe YourSearchTermHere

Above uses rgpipe even when it's not needed, which is slow, ripgrep can selectively use it with --pre-glob

rg --pre-glob '*.{xlsx,pptx,docx,pdf}' --pre rgpipe YourSearchTermHere

A more thorough pre glob:

rg --pre-glob '*.{pdf,xl[tas][bxm],xl[wsrta],do[ct],do[ct][xm],p[po]t[xm],p[op]t,html,htm,xhtm,xhtml,epub,chm,od[stp]}' --pre rgpipe YourSearchTermHere

An alias because that is a lot of typing

alias rgg="rg -i -z --max-columns-preview --max-columns 500 --hidden --no-ignore --pre-glob \
'*.{pdf,xl[tas][bxm],xl[wsrta],do[ct],do[ct][xm],p[po]t[xm],p[op]t,html,htm,xhtm,xhtml,epub,chm,od[stp]}' --pre rgpipe"

Step 1: use rgpipe to make text sidecar files

find-rgpipe-type() {
     find `pwd` -type f -iname "*.$1" -exec sh -c 'for f; do rgpipe "$f" > "${f%.*}.txt"; done' _ {} +
}

# or get fancy with xargs for multithreaded goodness

find-rgpipe-type-xargs() {
    find "$(pwd)" -type f -iname "*.$1" -print0 | xargs -0 -P0 -n 1 -I {} sh -c 'rgpipe "{}" > "{}.txt"'
}

Make text sidecars for all files with PDF extension under current directory using the function defined above.

find-rgpipe-type pdf

Step 2: Use ripgrep to search those files

rg YourSearchTermHere

1 - this hacker news comment

2 - The pre processing script that is the template into which I added some more file types

3 - midnight commander has great scripts on this subject

4 - lesspipe of course

5 - rga is a rust based tool doing a similar thing

rgpipe because the idea is similar to lesspipe.