Ubuntu – How to search recursively for a phrase in odt files

Are you searching for a file name or a word inside a file? grep searches inside the files, which seems to be what you want.

grep uses regular expressions - in fact, that's what the "re" part stands for. So, it does not use the normal bash wildcards; that is, abc* would not find words starting with abc, it would find words starting with ab, then zero or more c's following. But yes, if you simply give it a pattern, it will find it anywhere, with no knowledge of whole words. If you wanted to find whole words, you would need to create a regular expression to tell it that.

But, like most commands, you need to put the filename(s) at the end of the command, so your example would just sit there and wait for the filename.

As @plink said, use

grep -r -o -i "your_string" *

(or *.*, or other filespec). The errors can be ignored. If you are getting a lot of errors, you can append 2>/dev/null to the end, which will redirect stderr to a null device.

When you use Nautilus, just click search from the top level of your home folder (i.e. where you can see all your folders laid out) and in the search box only enter .pdf (or whatever extension like .txt that you want to find). That's what I do and it just returned me all the pdfs in my home folder. You don't need to use a wildcard or put quotes around the search term in Nautilus search, unlike when you use search programs on the command line.

The gnome-search-tool can be used to search within files- select the home folder or the directory to be searched and then click select more options, and input your search term where it says 'contains the text.' It can be quite slow as it works without an index, but I have used it several times and it has been useful for basic searches.