Unix find: search for executable files

Question

What type of parameter/flag can I use with the Unix find command so that I search executables?

Answer 1

So as to have another possibility¹ to find the files that are executable by the current user:

find . -type f -exec test -x {} \; -print

(the test command here is the one found in PATH, very likely /usr/bin/test, not the builtin).

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¹ Only use this if the -executable flag of find is not available! this is subtly different from the -perm +111 solution.

Answer 2

find . -executable -type f

does not really guarantee that the file is executable it will find files with the execution bit set. If you do

chmod a+x image.jpg

the above find will think image.jpg is an executable even if it is really a jpeg image with the execution bit set.

I generally work around the issue with this:

find . -type f -executable -exec file {} \; | grep -wE "executable|shared object|ELF|script|a\.out|ASCII text"

If you want the find to actually print dome information about executable files you can do something like this:

find . -type f -executable -printf "%i.%D %s %m %U %G %C@ %p" 2>/dev/null |while read LINE
do
  NAME=$(awk '{print $NF}' <<< $LINE)
  file -b $NAME |grep -qEw "executable|shared object|ELF|script|a\.out|ASCII text" && echo $LINE
done

In the above example the file's full pathname is in the last field and must reflect where you look for it with awk "NAME=$(awk '{print $NF}' <<< $LINE)" if the file name was elsewhere in the find output string you need to replace "NF" with the correct numerical position. If your separator is not space you also need to tell awk what your separator is.

Answer 3

Well the easy answer would be: "your executable files are in the directories contained in your PATH variable" but that would not really find your executables and could miss a lot of executables anyway.

I don't know much about mac but I think "mdfind 'kMDItemContentType=public.unix-executable'" might miss stuff like interpreted scripts

If it's ok for you to find files with the executable bits set (regardless of whether they are actually executable) then it's fine to do

find . -type f -perm +111 -print

where supported the "-executable" option will make a further filter looking at acl and other permission artifacts but is technically not much different to "-pemr +111".

Maybe in the future find will support "-magic " and let you look explicitly for files with a specific magic id ... but then you would haveto specify to fine all the executable formats magic id.

I'm unaware of a technically correct easy way out on unix.