Script to list only files of type ASCII text in the current directory?

Question

How to write a shell script which searches the current UNIX directory and returns the names of all files of type ASCII text?

Solution 1

The best of 2 worlds: Avoids the use of the useless xargs, and speeds things up, since the + triggers parallel invocation.

find . -type f -exec file {} + | grep ASCII

Solution 2

Exec 'file' on all the files in the current directoy, and then grep for 'ASCII':

find . -maxdepth 1 -exec file {} \; | grep ASCII

Solution 3

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file | grep ASCII

On CentOS 5, ASCII can mean a lot of things such as "ASCII C++ program text", "ASCII English text", and "ASCII text" so you might need to narrow it down more.

Solution 4

If it is just the current directory, no need for find.

Just try file * .* | fgrep ASCII

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Comments

[mattdm]

The script you've shown above doesn't seem to relate to the question at all. That's odd.

[sakisk]

How portable is grep ASCII? I remember that once I had problems because the output of file is not exactly the same on all systems but I don't recall if it was related with ASCII files.

[user unknown]

Yes, but I need to add, that this is a gnu-find extension. Most of the time I forget about that.

[jlliagre]

@user unknown: "+"' isn't a gnu-find extension. It was first introduced by SVR4 find then adopted by the POSIX standard and later included by Gnu find. Every current find implementation is very likely to implement it.

[user unknown]

Thanks @jiliagre, my horizon is to tall, I just know a little bit about about Linux, and enjoy to learn new facts.