How to check if the file is a binary file and read all the files which are not?

Question

How can I know if a file is a binary file?

For example, compiled c file.

I want to read all files from some directory, but I want ignore binary files.

Answer 1

Going off Bach's suggestion, I think --mime-encoding is the best flag to get something reliable from file.

file --mime-encoding [FILES ...] | grep -v '\bbinary$'

will print the files that file believes have a non-binary encoding. You can pipe this output through cut -d: -f1 to trim the : encoding if you just want the filenames.

---

Caveat: as @yugr reports below .doc files report an encoding of application/mswordbinary. This looks to me like a bug - the mime type is erroneously being concatenated with the encoding.

$ for flag in --mime --mime-type --mime-encoding; do
    echo "$flag"
    file "$flag" /tmp/example.{doc{,x},png,txt}
  done
--mime
/tmp/example.doc:  application/msword; charset=binary
/tmp/example.docx: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; charset=binary
/tmp/example.png:  image/png; charset=binary
/tmp/example.txt:  text/plain; charset=us-ascii
--mime-type
/tmp/example.doc:  application/msword
/tmp/example.docx: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
/tmp/example.png:  image/png
/tmp/example.txt:  text/plain
--mime-encoding
/tmp/example.doc:  application/mswordbinary
/tmp/example.docx: binary
/tmp/example.png:  binary
/tmp/example.txt:  us-ascii