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04heven5ake
Known Participant
October 28, 2017
Question

Acrobat Reader: Advanced search utility says 41 files inaccessible

  • October 28, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 2402 views

I am using Adobe Acrobat Reader DC 2017 Release Version 2017.012.20098.  When I used Advanced Search to search all the PDF files in a folder, I get the message:

`Search has skipped 41 files because either these files are corrupt or you don't have permissions to open them.`

I set all files to have read/write/execute permissions to all users, but still get this message.  Since I have hundreds of files, is there any way to have Reader tell me what files it can't open?

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1 reply

jane-e
Community Expert
jane-eCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 28, 2017

There is an answer on this thread:

Files skipped -- corrupt or permission; not the case. What's the fix or work-around?

Does that work for you?

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04heven5akeAuthor
Known Participant
October 28, 2017

Unfortunately, it does not.  If I correctly interpretted the thread you cited, the gist was that the presence of hidden files might cause confusion.  I enabled visibility of hidden and system files, and found none.  I also copied all the PDFs to another directory and tried Advanced Search there (same result).

I suspect that if I can only get Acrobat Reader to show what the problematic files are, that would go a long way toward figuring out what might be wrong.  Does anyone know how to do this?

    D
    D35SDA
    Participant
    January 24, 2021

    One thing you can do is to do the Advanced Search using the most common alphabets like "a" or "s" or any single letter or number that you know every pdf file in that folder will have. It will show results from every pdf file that it can access, and whatever files don't show up there are what the Adobe Search function considers corrupt.

     

    This will work better with Adobe Acrobat (paid version) because you can save the results into a pdf file, and it will just show you the file names whereas with Adobe Reader (free version), you would just have to open each search result to show the file name. Log the file names in the folder that show up on the search result, and the rest are corrupt. This will take a long time if you have very large number of files, so it obviously won't scale very well.

     

    Afterwards, you can use a batch repair software (I am not aware of a good, reputable, and free one), or just use a browser like Chrome to open the files and print to pdf for each file. This also doesn't scale very well, but with a reasonable number of files, can be done to repair all the "corrupt" pdf files.

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