I (*nix user) use a script that basically does: pdftotext -layout -eol unix -nopgbrk $PDF | egrep ... Many PDFs have compressed content streams, plain te

I (*nix user) use a script that basically does: pdftotext -layout -eol unix -nopgbrk $PDF | egrep ... Many PDFs have compressed content streams, plain text utilities only see metadata in that case. Cached, compressed text-only output is usually tiny, and can be zgrep-ed. pdfinfo shows document metadata (title, subject, keywords and more), but it's quite uncommon for these to be useful (Adobe and LᴬTᴇX-sourced PDFs tend to have this data). Both come with xpdf.