I need to find all the text files in a given directory for potential clean up. There is not a super easy way to find only text files, but I came up with a hacky solution:

# Using `fd` (new hotness)
fd . /tmp/ --exec file {} + | grep -P ":.*text" | cut -d: -f1

# Using old school `find` (old and busted)
find /tmp/ -exec file {} + | grep -P ":.*text" | cut -d: -f1

These rely on the file command to determine what the filetype is.

Linux has had the find command since the 1970s. It was probably great in it's day, but it's not very modern and isn't the most intuitive tool. I found fd (sometimes called fd-find) which is infinitely better and easier to use. If you're looking for a simple way to search your filesystem, it's the way to go.

fd-find is hosted on Github.

I needed to search recursively through a directory structure for files that matched a specific pattern. The simplest way that I found was using File::Find. I wrote a simple wrapper function to make searching simpler and more straight-forward. It uses regular expression matching so it should be quite flexible.

use File::Find;

# All the files that end in .pl
my @perl_files = find_recurse(qr/\.pl$/, "/home/user/");
# Anything with kitten in the name
my @kittens    = find_recurse(qr/kitten/, "/home/user/");
# All .mp3 and .ogg files
my @aud_files  = find_recurse(qr/\.(mp3|ogg)$/, "/home/user/");
# Search two directories
my @cfg_files  = find_recurse(qr/\.cfg$/, ("/tmp/", "/etc/"));

# Recursively search for files matching a pattern
sub find_recurse {
    my ($pattern, @dirs) = @_;
    if (!@dirs) {
        @dirs = (".");
    }

    my @ret = ();
    find(sub { if (/$pattern/) { push(@ret, $File::Find::name) } }, @dirs);

    return @ret;
}