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

How about this:

$ grep -rl "needle text" my_folder | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -r -0 file | grep -e ':[^:]*text[^:]*$' | grep -v -e 'executable'

If you want the filenames without the file types, just add a final sed filter.

$ grep -rl "needle text" my_folder | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -r -0 file | grep -e ':[^:]*text[^:]*$' | grep -v -e 'executable' | sed 's|:[^:]*$||'

You can filter-out unneeded file types by adding more -e 'type' options to the last grep command.

EDIT:

If your xargs version supports the -d option, the commands above become simpler:

$ grep -rl "needle text" my_folder | xargs -d '\n' -r file | grep -e ':[^:]*text[^:]*$' | grep -v -e 'executable' | sed 's|:[^:]*$||'