4 Oct
2000
4 Oct
'00
10:46 a.m.
On 04-Oct-2000 Tony Duell wrote:
strings(1) also fails if the document is in
French or any language that
uses accents.
I use mswordview to get the "content" of .doc files my clients insist on
e-mailing me.
-Philip
When I receive a mickeysoft-word document attached to e-mail, if I
happen to feel like reading it instead of just deleting it, I save it
to a text file and then do a search for words like "the" in order to
find out where the text is hidden.
The strings(1) command on unix boxen is useful for this. What it does is
look for strings of printable characters in the file (the minimum length
of the string is set by a command line option) and display them. OK, so
it loses formatting and even newlines, etc, but it will find most of
the text in a word processor file.