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POPHP shell_exec inconsistent
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copied!<p>I'm trying to search through PDF files for multiple key words. I've got ~60 PDFs and ~8 key words and don't fancy ~480 manual searches.</p> <p>I'm open for other suggestions (see below), but at present my approach is to use <code>mdfind</code> on OS X, like this:</p> <pre><code>$finds = array(); foreach ($search as $term) { $result = ""; $cleanResult = array(); $shellQuery = "mdfind -onlyin \"$wd\" \"kind:pdf $term\""; echo "\n\n$shellQuery\n"; $result = shell_exec($shellQuery); echo $result; $cleanResult = split("\n", $result); array_pop($cleanResult); $finds[$term] = $cleanResult; unset($result); unset($cleanResult); } print_r($finds); </code></pre> <p>However, although this builds <code>$shellQuery</code> just fine, for some reason <code>$result</code> doesn't always get populated even when the command works (i.e. if I copy and paste the value of <code>$shellQuery</code> into a terminal window, it works as expected).</p> <p>Let's say <code>$search</code> contains 'foo', 'bar' and 'joe', it might find 'foo' and 'joe' fine, but return nothing for 'bar'. If I remove 'foo' and 'joe' from the array and just search for 'bar', it'll find 'bar' fine. Does it need a rest between calls or something?!</p> <p>Incidentally, my preferred approach would be to do something like:</p> <p><code>find . -name "*.pdf*" -exec pdftotext {} - \; | grep -i -l "foo"</code></p> <p>but I can't get this to work in Terminal. I've installed <a href="http://www.bluem.net/en/mac/packages/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bluem.net/en/mac/packages/</a> (I struggle to compile things, so packages like this = thumbs up!), but every time I try and pipe this to grep (e.g. <code>pdftotext myfile.pdf - | grep -i -l "foo"</code>) grep just returns <code>(standard output)</code> and no more.</p>

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