How to “cat” or “less” a libreoffice impress .odp file?

Question

Is there any way to cat or less a .odp file just like we have for .odt files as mentioned here

Answer 1

The comment on your question, posted by Rinzwind gave me an idea. Thank you my friend. I didn't ever tried this before but, as long as you can extract your odt's, you can grep the odt's contents instead of the odt itself.

So the procedure would be something like this:

cd THE-FOLDER-CONTAINING-THE-ODT
mkdir ext
unzip THE-ODT-FILE -d ext
cd ext
grep KEYWORDS * -ri

Example:

In this example I am inside a folder named "ray", in which I have a document named practicas-ray-del-angel-gerardo-membretada-2021.odt. So I am going to use the same process just by changing the parameters in order to find the word "RAYMUNDO".

cd ray
mkdir ext
unzip practicas-ray-del-angel-gerardo-membretada-2021.odt -d ext
cd ext
grep "raymundo" * -ri

The next screenshot will give you an image on all the process.

Scripting

Of course this would be a major problem if you have to run this in a bunch of documents so I would put the process which will run using the proper parameters on the command line. The file will contain this:

odtgrep.sh

---

if [[ -d "ext" ]]
then
  echo "ext exists. Will not be created but we will remove the contents on it."
  rm ext/* -rf
else
  echo "First time run? Let's create the ext directory."
fi
unzip $1 -d ext
cd ext
grep "$2" * -ri

Explanation

---

Directory validation

First we will check if the directory ext does exist.

if [[ -d "ext" ]]
then
  echo "ext exists. Will not be created but we will remove the contents on it."
  rm ext/* -rf
else
  echo "First time run? Let's create the ext directory."
fi

If it doesn't exist, we need to create it. But if it already exists we just need to clean up whatever is inside the folder in order to prevent the zip command to stop asking if we wish to overwrite the existing files. The messages on the terminal are useful for debugging purposes but can be omitted when you wish.

Extraction

Once we are sure the ext directory is ready to be used, we will unzip the file, using the first parameter in the passed via command line to the script.

unzip $1 -d ext

After which we will enter the directory to work with the files via:

cd ext

Searching

This code will search the desired word(s), provided in the command line with the second parameter inside every single file on the ext directory.

grep "$2" * -ri

Please note the content.xml file is the one in charge to keep the text, so maybe you wish to change the code for this:

grep "$2" content.xml -i

Running

The script should be run with:

for i in *.odt; do bash odtgrep.sh "$i" "raymundo"; done;

This will:

1. Make an array with all the odt files in the current folder
2. Run the Script on every file in the array
3. Search the "raymundo" word inside every single file and show the results if found.

Considerations

• Please make sure you use the proper variables and temporal (ext) folder in order to prevent damages on you data.
• Make sure your quotation marks will work and avoid using spaces when possible.
• When running on a bunch of files you will see a lot of data on your terminal, so you may wish to use the -l parameter on grep in order to show the less data possible.
• The file name containing the text found on your search will be presented by the zip file itself with a text like: Archive: practicas-ray-del-angel-gerardo-membretada-2021.odt

Let us know if this works for you. Any comments or suggestions on how to improve this code are welcome.