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   which is very unhandy and outputs unneeded texts such as mime type information  Any better solutions  I have lots of images and other binary files in the same folder with a lot of text files that I need to search through

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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

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I have two issues with histumness  answer    It only list text files  It does not actually search them as requested  To actually search  use  find   -type f -exec grep -Iq         -and -print0   xargs -0 grep  needle text   It spawns a grep process for every file  which is very slow  A better solution is then  find   -type f -print0   xargs -0 grep -IZl     xargs -0 grep  needle text    or simply  find   -type f -print0   xargs -0 grep -I  needle text    This only takes 0 2s compared to 4s for solution above  2 5GB data   7700 files   i e  20x faster    Also  nobody cited ag  the Silver Searcher or ack-grep  as alternatives  If one of these are available  they are much better alternatives   ag -t  needle text       Much faster than ack ack -t  needle text      or ack-grep   As a last note  beware of false positives  binary files taken as text files   I already had false positive using either grep ag ack  so better list the matched files first before editing the files

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If you are interested in finding any file type by their magic bytes using the awesome file utility combined with power of find  this can come in handy       Let s make some test files   mkdir ASCII-finder   cd ASCII-finder   dd if  dev urandom of binary file bs 1M count 1 1 0 records in 1 0 records out 1048576 bytes  1 0 MB  1 0 MiB  copied  0 009023 s  116 MB s   file binary file binary file  data   echo 123  gt  text txt     Let the magic begin   find -type f -print0         xargs -0 -I    bash -c  file        grep ASCII  amp  gt  dev null  amp  amp  echo  file is ASCII       --      Output   file is ASCII    text txt   Legend    is the interactive shell prompt where we enter our commands  You can modify the part after  amp  amp  to call some other script or do some other stuff inline as well  i e  if that file contains given string  cat the entire file or look for a secondary string in it   Explanation    find items that are files Make xargs feed each item as a line into one liner bash command script file checks type of file by magic byte  grep checks if ASCII exists  if so  then after  amp  amp  your next command executes  find prints results null separated  this is good to escape filenames with spaces and meta-characters in it  xargs   using -0 option  reads them null separated  -I    takes each record and uses as positional parameter args to bash script  -- for bash ensures whatever comes after it is an argument even if it starts with - like -c which could otherwise be interpreted as bash option   If you need to find types other than ASCII  simply replace grep ASCII with other type  like grep  PDF document  version 1 4

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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

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I prefer xargs  find   -type f   xargs grep -I  needle text    if your filenames are weird look up using the -0 options   find   -type f -print0   xargs -0 grep -I  needle text

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I know this is an old thread  but I stumbled across it and thought I d share my method which I have found to be a very fast way to use find to find only non-binary files   find   -type f -exec grep -Iq         -print   The -I option to grep tells it to immediately ignore binary files and the   option along with the -q will make it immediately match text files so it goes very fast  You can change the -print to a -print0 for piping into an xargs -0 or something if you are concerned about spaces  thanks for the tip   lucas werkmeister    Also the first dot is only necessary for certain BSD versions of find such as on OS X  but it doesn t hurt anything just having it there all the time if you want to put this in an alias or something   EDIT  As  ruslan correctly pointed out  the -and can be omitted since it is implied

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Based on this SO question    grep -rIl  needle text  my folder

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find   -type f   xargs file   grep  ASCII text    awk -F    print  1     Use find command to list all files  use file command to verify they are text  not tar key   finally use awk command to filter and print the result

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How about this   find   -type f xargs grep  needle text

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Here s a simplified version with extended explanation for beginners like me who are trying to learn how to put more than one command in one line   If you were to write out the problem in steps  it would look like this      For every file in this directory    Check the filetype    If it s an ASCII file  then print out the filename   To achieve this  we can use three UNIX commands  find  file  and grep    find will check every file in the directory    file will give us the filetype  In our case  we re looking for a return of  ASCII text   grep will look for the keyword  ASCII  in the output from file  So how can we string these together in a single line  There are multiple ways to do it  but I find that doing it in order of our pseudo-code makes the most sense  especially to a beginner like me     find    -exec file          grep  ASCII   Looks complicated  but not bad when we break it down   find      look through every file in this directory  The find command prints out the filename of any file that matches the  expression   or whatever comes after the path  which in our case is the current directory or     The most important thing to understand is that everything after that first bit is going to be evaluated as either True or False  If True  the file name will get printed out  If not  then the command moves on    -exec   this flag is an option within the find command that allows us to use the result of some other command as the search expression  It s like calling a function within a function   file      the command being called inside of find  The file command returns a string that tells you the filetype of a file  Regularly  it would look like this  file mytextfile txt  In our case  we want it to use whatever file is being looked at by the find command  so we put in the curly braces    to act as an empty variable  or parameter  In other words  we re just asking for the system to output a string for every file in the directory          this is required by find and is the punctuation mark at the end of our -exec command  See the manual for  find  for more explanation if you need it by running man find     grep  ASCII      is a pipe  Pipe take the output of whatever is on the left and uses it as input to whatever is on the right  It takes the output of the find command  a string that is the filetype of a single file  and tests it to see if it contains the string  ASCII   If it does  it returns true   NOW  the expression to the right of find    will return true when the grep command returns true  Voila

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Another way of doing this      find    xargs file        grep  ASCII text    If you want empty files too       find    xargs file        egrep  ASCII text empty

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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

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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  lt search gt        exit fi  find   -type f -print0       xargs -0 file       grep -P text       cut -d  -f1       xargs -i  grep -Pil   1

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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

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I do it this way  1  since there re too many files   30k  to search thru  I generate the text file list daily for use via crontab using below command   find  to src folder -type f -exec file         grep text   cut -d  -f1  gt     src list  amp    2  create a function in  bashrc   findex         cat    src list   xargs grep      2 gt  dev null     Then I can use below command to do the search   findex  needle text    HTH

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Why is it unhandy  If you need to use it often  and don t want to type it every time just define a bash function for it   function findTextInAsciiFiles         usage  findTextInAsciiFiles DIRECTORY NEEDLE TEXT     find   1  -type f -exec grep -l   2        -exec file         grep text     put it in your  bashrc and then just run   findTextInAsciiFiles your folder  needle text    whenever you want     EDIT to reflect OP s edit   if you want to cut out mime informations you could just add a further stage to the pipeline that filters out mime informations  This should do the trick  by taking only what comes before    cut -d    -f1   function findTextInAsciiFiles         usage  findTextInAsciiFiles DIRECTORY NEEDLE TEXT     find   1  -type f -exec grep -l   2        -exec file         grep text   cut -d     -f1

[linux] Linux command: How to 'find' only text files?

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