Finding human-readable files on unix

Question

I'd like to find human-readable files on my linux machine without a file extension constraint. Those files should be of human sensing files like text, configuration, html, source-code etc. files. Could you suggest a way to filter and locate.

Answer 1

find and file are your friends here:

find /dir/to/search -type f -exec sh -c 'file -b {} | grep text &>/dev/null' \; -print

this will find any files ( NOTE: it will not find symlinks directories sockets etc only regular files ) in /dir/to/search and run sh -c 'file -b {} | grep text &>/dev/null' \; which looks at the type of file and looks for text in the description. if this returns true ( ie text is in the line) then it prints the filename.

NOTE: using the -b flag to filemeans that the filename is not printed and therefore cannot create any issues with the grep. eg without the -b flag the binary file gettext would erroneously be detected as a textfile.

eg

root@osdevel-pete# find /bin -exec sh -c 'file -b {} |  grep text &>/dev/null' \; -print
/bin/gunzip
/bin/svnshell.sh
/bin/unicode_stop
/bin/unicode_start
/bin/zcat
/bin/redhat_lsb_init
root@osdevel-pete# find /bin -type f -name *text*
/bin/gettext

EDIT:

If you want to look in compressed files use the --uncompress flag to file. for more info and flags to file see man file

Answer 2

How about

find /dir/to/search -type f | xargs file | grep text

find will give you a list of files.

xargs file will run the file command on each of the lines from the piped input.

Answer 3

i use

    file directory/to/search/* 

For example to find only human readable files in a directory called home use:

    file home/* 

and the readable file will have a format such as ASCII text