How to list all text (non-binary) files in a git repository?

Question

I have a repository with a lot of autogenerated source files I've marked as "binary" in .gitattributes (they are checked in because not everyone has access to the generator tools). Additionally, the repo has a lot of source-ish files in ignored directories (again, generated as part of the build processes), and a number of actual binary files (e.g. little resource files like icons).

I'd now like to find all the non-auto-generated and non-ignored files in the repo. I thought I'd just do this with find and a bunch of exclusions, but now I have a horrendous find statement with a dozen clauses (and it still doesn't perfectly do the job). git ls-files works but shows me all the binary files without differentiation, which I have to filter out.

So, I'm wondering: is there a simple command I can run which lists every file checked into the the repo, and which git considers a "text" file?

Answer 1

git grep --cached -Il ''

lists all non-empty regular (no symlinks) text files:

• -I: don't match the pattern in binary files
• -l: only show the matching file names, not matching lines
• '': the empty string makes git grep match any non-empty file
• --cached: also find files added with git add but not yet committed (optional)

Or you could use How to determine if Git handles a file as binary or as text? in a for loop with git ls-files.

TODO empty files.

Find all binary files instead: Find all binary files in git HEAD

Tested on Git 2.16.1 with this test repo.

Answer 2

A clever hack to achieve this: listing all non-binary files that contains carriage returns

$ git grep --cached -I -l -e $'\r'

For my case, an empty string works better:

$ git grep --cached -I -l -e $''

Took it from git list binary and/or non-binary files?.

Answer 3

The standard method for listing non-ignored files is:

git ls-files --exclude-standard --cached

But, as you seen, it lists all versioned files.

One workaround could be to define in a separate file "exclude_binaries" an exclusion pattern in order to match all binaries that you know of.

git ls-files --exclude-standard --cached \
--exclude-from=/path/to/`exclude_binaries`

That would be a less complex find, but it doesn't provide a fully automated way to list non-binary files: you still have to identify and list them in a separate pattern file.