list/find all regular files in all subdirectories excluding binary files

Question

In Linux.

I know I can do find . -type f, but that includes binary file and I couldn't find a way to exclude them with find

Answer 1

file /usr/bin/file, for example, does not include the word "binary" in its output on my system. If file -i is available, it does include the word "binary". Without -i, it may be more reliable to test for the presence of the word "text".

find -type f -exec sh -c "file {} | grep text >/dev/null" \; -print

or

find -type f -exec sh -c "file {} | grep text >/dev/null" \; -ls

Using -i:

find -type f -exec sh -c "file -i {} | grep -v binary >/dev/null" \; -print

Using file is only going to be an approximation since it's using heuristics to determine the type of file and there's no hard-and-fast definition of what constitutes a "binary" file. Is an empty file "binary"? file says it is. Also, there are lots of (normally uncommon) ways to trigger false positive IDs by file.

Answer 2

show all files without executable permissions (although this is not specifically binary, so it may not be exactly what you need):

ls -l | awk '{if ($1 !~ /x/) print $8}'

Answer 3

Another way would be to exclude all files which have execute permission set for either user, group or others:

find . -type f ! -perm /u=x,g=x,o=x

(If binary equals execute permissions...)

Answer 4

find . -type f -exec file "{}" | grep -vE "ELF|archive"