grep but skip executables

[Cody Godines_1]

Hi everyone,
How can I grep a set of files in a directory but ignoring the executables, object, and archives? Also, is there a way to grep a .gz file without having to gunzip it?
Thanks,
-Cody

[Hai Nguyen_1]

Cody,

Go to the target directory and run:

# grep -li *

which will return the list of files having the , ignoring the case-sensitivity.

Hai

[Patrick Wallek]

If you are doing something like a 'grep something *' then there is no easy way to skip files.

To look at the contents of a gz file do a 'gzcat filename.gz | grep whateveryouarelookingfor'

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Cody:

You could use the 'file' command on the file to descern whether or not the file is an ASCII text file. If yes, then 'grep' it.

Regards!

...JRF...

[A. Clay Stephenson]

If it were me I would send each file to the file command and grep for "text". You will also exclude binary data files that way but you will include things that are commands text like Perl scripts.

e.g.

[Wodisch_1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Cody,

so the example I gave to your other thread would have to be expanded with lines for ZIPped files:

find /parent -type f -print |
while read name; do
case "$name" in
*.gz) zcat "$name" | grep 'string' && echo "$name" ;;
*.Z) pcat "$name" | grep 'string' && echo "$name" ;;
*) case "$(file $name)" in
*text*) grep 'string' $name /dev/null ;;
esac ;;
esac
done | more

HTH,
Wodisch

[Rick Beldin]

How about something like this?

for i in *
do
if [ "`file $i | grep exe`" = "" ]
then
echo "not an exe"
else
echo $i "is an exe"
fi
done

This will catch only binary executables.

You could use something like:

for i in `find . -type f`
blah...

to only search 'real' files and skip links.

[John Dvorchak]

How about something like this:

find /etc -type f | xargs -l grep string

[Andrew F Greenwood]

For the text files I would use:

file * | grep text | cut -f1 -d: | xargs grep [-h|-l] /dev/null

For the .gz file I would use:

gunzip