Project-SearchEverywhere

This is a tool that lists out all the lines containing [keyword] in the [File(s)] specified by user.

I have made this tool especially for college students so that they can easily find out the topics they wish to study from a number of ppts, pdfs and document files provided by their professors. However, in general, it can be used by anyone.

This is a powerful tool, as whenever you need to fetch a particular information from a file or a bunch of files, you can just give it a go and get exactly what you looking for without even opening any files.

This works well with .txt(plain text files), .odt/.docx/.doc(word documents), .odp/.pptx/.ppt(presentations), .pdf(pdf) file formats. A quick demo, showing working of this program is available here

Analogy

If you are familiar with cat and grep tools and have at some point of time piped your output to grep command or done piping like cat syslog.log | grep ERROR or cat *.txt | grep "xyz information" then to tell you this program basically does similar type of work, under the hood.

As cat only works on plain text files, and can't show you the text in .odp/.ppt/.pptx(presentations), .odt/.doc/.docx(word documents), .pdf files, this program does all this conversions in background to allow you to even peek in these files and get the information you are looking for.

Difference

-> In a directory having plain text files, below both will work with same efficiency.

cat * | grep "information"

SearchEverywhere - "information"

-> But if the files are word documents, pdfs, presentations then:

cat * | grep "information"    # would NOT work

SearchEverywhere - "information"    # will still work

The results are saved for later use in a results.txt file, so if in case user wants to use them, he/she may. But the file is overwritten every time a new search is performed.

On files other than .txt type, conversions are done, and new directories are made. They can safely be removed after program terminates or can be utilised by user.

Installation

This works on almost all types of linux distros (i.e. debian-based, arch-based, redhat, fedora, etc) and can be installed by the following commands:

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/suraj-singh12/Project-SearchEverywhere/

cd Project-SearchEverywhere

sudo chmod +x ./dist/SearchEverywhere

Install Dependencies

sudo chmod +x dependency.sh
sudo ./dependency.sh

Install the tool

sudo sh install.sh

NOTE: If you are installing the tool in WSL, ensure you also install the dependencies in wsl_additional_requirements.txt

Usage

To learn to use this easily, you may enter into testing_base directory, post installation of the tool.

cd testing_base
SearchEverywhere - heading    # will search 'heading' keyword in all files

SearchEverywhere -txt python  # will search 'python' keyword in all txt files
SearchEverywhere text_file.txt python # will search 'python' keyword in text_file.txt file

SearchEverywhere -odt "Final Purpose" # will search 'Final Purpose' keyword in all .odt file type files
SearchEverywhere mydocument2.odt "Final Purpose" # will search 'Final Purpose' keyword in mydocument.odt file

SearchEverywhere -odp "contains specific" # will search 'contains specific' keyword in all .odp files
SearchEverywhere mypresentation2.odp "contains specific" # will search 'contains specific' keyword in mypresentation.odp file

SearchEverywhere -pdf "member functions" # will search 'member functions' in all .pdf files
SearchEverywhere LectureNotes.pdf "member functions" # will search 'member functions' in LectureNotes.pdf files

List of all extensions supported:

txt odp ppt pptx odt doc docx pdf

An example video is given here, you may prefer to go through it incase you are facing any difficulty in learning this.

Few Points

1. The search is case insensitive.
2. First time run on .odp/.ppt/.pptx files takes some time. The time taken is linear with the number of .odp/.ppt/.pptx files in the directory

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome! Kindly check out CONTRIBUTING.md

Running Demo of Project

1625151319934.mp4