grep command not finding text in MS-Office or PDF documents

All three formats need to be converted to text before they can be searched using tools such as grep.

For “old-style” .doc files, use catdoc:

catdoc file.doc | grep word

For OOXML .docx files, use docx2txt:

docx2txt < file.docx | grep word

or

docx2txt file.docx - | grep word

For PDF files, use pdfgrep:

pdfgrep word file.pdf

or pdftotext:

pdftotext file.pdf - | grep word

If you switch to ripgrep you can use a preprocessor:

#!/bin/sh -

if [ ! -s "$1" ]; then exec cat; fi

case "$1" in
*.pdf)
  exec pdftotext - -
  ;;
*.doc)
  exec catdoc -
  ;;
*.docx)
  exec docx2txt - -
  ;;
*)
  exec cat
  ;;
esac

Save this to a file, make it executable (chmod 755), and use it with --pre:

rg --pre /path/to/preprocessor word

See the ripgrep guide for tips on reducing the overhead of the preprocessor.