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

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file | grep -P text | cut -d: -f1 | xargs grep -Pil "search"

This is unfortunately not space save. Putting this into bash script makes it a bit easier.

This is space safe:

#!/bin/bash
#if [ ! "$1" ] ; then
    echo "Usage: $0 ";
    exit
fi

find . -type f -print0 \
  | xargs -0 file \
  | grep -P text \
  | cut -d: -f1 \
  | xargs -i% grep -Pil "$1" "%"