PDF Finder 🗞 🖇

This is a simple command line utility that allows you to look for PDF documents in any directory (recursively).

I have a lot of PDF documents spread around my home directory and subfolders and I'm too unorganized to do something about it. Instead of taking an hour to organize the files, I took 7 hours to write this program. It uses pdfinfo to collect metadata. The same can probably be achieved with simple shell scripts (globbing combined with grep, sed and awk gets you very very far). I chose PHP because I wanted to do something more with this (JSON API for my home network). That part is left as an exercise for the reader.

There's two executables in bin: pdf-finder.php and pdf-show-info.php.

Runtime requirements

To run it, you need Composer and PHP >= 7.4, as well as poppler-utils. Installation of poppler-utils on Ubuntu is very simple:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install poppler-utils

The scripts are marked as executable so you can easily add them to your PATH. In my case, ~/.local/bin is in my PATH, so I did the following:

ln -s /path/to/repository/bin/pdf-finder.php ~/.local/bin/pdf-finder
ln -s /path/to/repository/bin/pdf-show-info.php ~/.local/bin/pdf-show-info

Now you can just invoke them with pdf-finder and pdf-show-info respectively.

Finding documents: bin/pdf-finder.php

The first executable, pdf-finder.php, is used to actually find PDFs based on search terms. The first argument should always be the directory. Filters are optional.

Examples

To find every PDF document with 'python' in its path, filename or any metadata field in the ~/Documents folder:

bin/pdf-finder.php ~/Documents python

... with 'python' in the title (metadata property):

bin/pdf-finder.php ~/Documents title=python

... with 'ritchie' in the author field and where the title property is set:

bin/pdf-finder.php ~/Documents author=ritchie title=

... with 'programming' and 'python' in the filename:

bin/pdf-finder.php ~/Documents filename=programming filename=python

Available filters

Filters are based on the information supplied by the pdfinfo command (man page here). Dates, when given, are printed in ISO-8601 format. Common fields are listed below. filepath (or path) is the path excluding the filename. filename (or file or name) is the name of the file excluding the path.

Common filters
filepath, path
filename, file, name
title
subject
keywords
author
creator
producer

A note on filters

About 50% of the PDF files on my computer contain usable metadata. It's almost never complete, although this depends on the source you got your files from.

Using path=python yields the same results as filepath=python. The path is an alias to filepath. The same goes for file and name: both are aliases to filename.

Filters are cumulative: adding more filters further restricts the output.

Listing document info: bin/pdf-show-info.php

The second utility is basically a fancy wrapper for pdfinfo. It takes one argument, the path to a PDF document, and spits out a table with information about the document.

$ bin/pdf-show-info.php ~/path/to/document.pdf

Final note

Do as you please, as that is the beauty of open source.