I need to extract some textual information from a large bunch of MS Word files, mostly at the .doc format (i.e. Office 2003 version or before, if I remember correctly); there also may be some .docx files but let's concentrate on the .doc format for now.

This is quite new to me, I've never had before to do that, and I am usually not working on Windows platform and Microsoft Office document formats, except for a few cases with Excel documents. So I am not sure how to handle this requirement.

I also found that there seem to be surprisingly few CPAN solutions for extracting data from MS Word documents (especially in the pre-2003 format).

The Text::Extract::Word module may be doing what I need, but it has a dependency on the OLE::Storage_Lite module (and perhaps some others). My understanding is the OLE::... domain modules will only work on Windows boxes (because they are presumably using Windows and/or MS Office libraries). Is this a correct assumption? If such is the case, then it would be a problem for us, because, ultimately, the whole much larger process should run on a Linux server.

Does any monk here have some experience on this type of needs, i.e., to summarize, how to extract textual data from MS Word files (pre-2003 format) on a Linux box, where OLE modules would presumably not run? Any suggestions? Any other module that I overlooked? Thank you very much for any help in this respect.