Search text within multiple pdfs and docs

I got a bunch of notes written by other students, but they are from an old textbook that didn't deal with everything in the same order, so I need to search through the notes for every chapter (each individual chapter is in a different .pdf or .doc) for "trace conditioning" for example.

I used to use Google Desktop for this, I have Launchy now and I told it to search pdfs, but it only searches the titles, not the content.

Thanks for any help.

Solution 1:

Recoll is probably the most versatile document search engine you will find on Linux:

It supports a plethora of different formats and is very customizable.

For installation instructions and other pointers please check out this answer. The official documentation is very useful, too.

Solution 2:

Install the package pdfgrep

sudo apt-get install pdfgrep

then use the command:

find /path -iname '*.pdf' -exec pdfgrep pattern {} +