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Grep is not much of an advantage when Mac, Windows and Linux all have as-you-type full-text search of common formats like HTML and PDF.
by ben509 6y ago
Grep is not much of an advantage when Mac, Windows and Linux all have as-you-type full-text search of common formats like HTML and PDF.
- anonymoushn 6y agoCan you point me to the as-you-type full-text search on Mac for a directory transitively containing 20,000 pdfs?
- salutis 6y agoI use Apple’s built-in Spotlight search to search in Markdown files and PDF documents, albeit I do not have 20,000 of them. Would it be a problem for Spotlight to index 20,000 PDF documents?
- ben509 6y agoSure, Spotlight has been around for at least a decade; it's the little magnifying glass at the right end of the main menubar. It definitely indexes PDFs with a text layer as well as other document formats; I've been running them through OCR for ages and have 28,000 in my records. You can also install extensions for other formats. It indexes your whole disk; if there's a limit as to how many files it will index, I've yet to reach it. I checked Apple's developer documentation, and they don't mention one.
- fit2rule 6y agoPro's for grep/silversearcher/etc.: quite fast, quite efficient, redirect-able to other tools, maybe a little sqlite here, maybe a bit of xml/svg there and most important of all: private, under my control... mdimporter: yeah, sure, just no .. mmkay?