help understanding this command

[bwanaaa]

in terminal:

pdftotext filename.pdf -|grep -v grep|grep AAAAA -A 1000|tr -d '\014'|sed -e '/^$/d'|base64 -d > test.zip

OK, it takes a pdf file and converts it to text. but after that there are a bunch of greps that are throwing me. I get that it searches for AAAAA but also do not understand what follows.

tnx.

 

[Crusty]

grep -v grep : print all lines that don't contain 'grep'
grep AAAAA -A 1000 : then print all lines that contain AAAAA and also the next 1000 lines from each matching line
tr -d '\014' : remove any 'form feed' characters
sed -e '/^$/d' : delete all blank lines
base64 -d : decode from base64
> test.zip : store the resulting data in test.zip

 

[bwanaaa]

thank you crusty. this line is a shell command for pulling out the base64 encoded zip file from a pdf describing an NSA key logger here:
http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35668.pdf

don't know why they threw in the grep -v grep command. there are no 'greps' in that file.
maybe to confuse people like me.