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To: "Bart Schaefer" <schaefer@brasslantern.com>
Cc: Greg Badros <gjb@cs.washington.edu>, zsh-users@math.gatech.edu
Subject: Re: is text file?
References: <199709292128.VAA10542@dal-tsa12-29.cyberramp.net>  	<qrrsoum7p0d.fsf@demille.cs.washington.edu> <970930115613.ZM17003@candle.brasslantern.com>
From: Greg Badros <gjb@cs.washington.edu>
Date: 30 Sep 1997 13:02:37 -0700
In-Reply-To: "Bart Schaefer"'s message of "Tue, 30 Sep 1997 11:56:12 -0700"
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I use this in ~/zsh-fns/only-text-files:

# Filter out non-text-files from the argument list
# Usage: grep -c foo `only-text-files *`
file -f =(for i in "$@"; do print $i; done) |\
   awk -F: '{name = $1; $1 = ""; if ($0 ~ / text( |$)/) { print name }}'

I think it's important to use "file", as that is the system-supported way
of testing whether a file contains text.  The file man page also
strongly encourages the use of the string "text" in files which are
text, so it's pretty reliable to use the regexp (one possible exception
is postscript files).

Greg J. Badros
gjb@cs.washington.edu
Seattle, WA  USA
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/gjb