Score:3

Searching LibreOffice files in Ubuntu 20.04

cn flag

I've got a bunch of LibreOffice files and I'm trying to find the one that contains specific text. In GNOME 3.38.5, which comes with Ubuntu 20.04, I tried searching from the file manager making sure to to select "Full Text". But nothing comes up, even for text which I know is present. From this I deduce that either GNOME isn't capable of indexing or searching in various file types like some other systems are, or else this capability isn't enabled.

I have found various shell scripts which appear to unzip part of the ODT file and pipe it through grep, however this is somewhat unwieldy and none of the examples I found bothered to actually tell you which file contained the text, which for my purposes make it useless. Also, most of the suggestions I found were quite old leaving the hope that newer versions of Ubuntu have plugged this deficiency.

Is there some way I can enable searching through large numbers of LibreOffice files in 20.04 or newer?

mangohost

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