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

Here's how I've done it ...

1 . make a small script to test if a file is plain text istext:

#!/bin/bash
[[ "$(file -bi $1)" == *"file"* ]]

2 . use find as before

find . -type f -exec istext {} \; -exec grep -nHi mystring {} \;

Answer 2

Although it is an old question, I think this info bellow will add to the quality of the answers here.

When ignoring files with the executable bit set, I just use this command:

find . ! -perm -111

To keep it from recursively enter into other directories:

find . -maxdepth 1 ! -perm -111

No need for pipes to mix lots of commands, just the powerful plain find command.

• Disclaimer: it is not exactly what OP asked, because it doesn't check if the file is binary or not. It will, for example, filter out bash script files, that are text themselves but have the executable bit set.

That said, I hope this is useful to anyone.

Answer 3

How about this

 find . -type f|xargs grep "needle text"

Answer 4

• bash example to serach text "eth0" in /etc in all text/ascii files

grep eth0 $(find /etc/ -type f -exec file {} \; | egrep -i "text|ascii" | cut -d ':' -f1)