Linux command: How to 'find' only text files?

Question

After a few searches from Google, what I come up with is:

find my_folder -type f -exec grep -l \"needle text\" {} \\; -exec file {} \\; | grep text
         


        

Answer 1

Why is it unhandy? If you need to use it often, and don't want to type it every time just define a bash function for it:

function findTextInAsciiFiles {
    # usage: findTextInAsciiFiles DIRECTORY NEEDLE_TEXT
    find "$1" -type f -exec grep -l "$2" {} \; -exec file {} \; | grep text
}

put it in your .bashrc and then just run:

findTextInAsciiFiles your_folder "needle text"

whenever you want.

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EDIT to reflect OP's edit:

if you want to cut out mime informations you could just add a further stage to the pipeline that filters out mime informations. This should do the trick, by taking only what comes before :: cut -d':' -f1:

function findTextInAsciiFiles {
    # usage: findTextInAsciiFiles DIRECTORY NEEDLE_TEXT
    find "$1" -type f -exec grep -l "$2" {} \; -exec file {} \; | grep text | cut -d ':' -f1
}