Finding Executable Files Using Ls and Grep

Finding executable files using ls and grep

Do you need to use ls? You can use find to do the same:

find . -maxdepth 1 -perm -111 -type f

will return all executable files in the current directory. Remove the -maxdepth flag to traverse all child directories.

You could try this terribleness but it might match files that contain strings that look like permissions.

ls -lsa | grep -E "[d\-](([rw\-]{2})x){1,3}"

How to get the name of the executables files in bash with ls

Don't parse ls. This can be done with find.

find . -type f -perm /a+x

This finds files with any of the executable bits set: user, group, or other.

Search for executable files using find command

On GNU versions of find you can use -executable:

find . -type f -executable -print

For BSD versions of find, you can use -perm with + and an octal mask:

find . -type f -perm +111 -print

In this context "+" means "any of these bits are set" and 111 is the execute bits.

Note that this is not identical to the -executable predicate in GNU find. In particular, -executable tests that the file can be executed by the current user, while -perm +111 just tests if any execute permissions are set.

Older versions of GNU find also support the -perm +111 syntax, but as of 4.5.12 this syntax is no longer supported. Instead, you can use -perm /111 to get this behavior.

How to use grep command to list all the files executable by user in current directory?

OK -- if you MUST use grep:

ls -l | grep '^[^d]..[sx]' | awk '{ print $9 }'

Find all executable files that depend on the specified library in the specified directory

The trick is to execute a shell script rather than a single command to be able to re-use the file name.

finddepend() {
# Arg 1: The directory where to find
# Arg 2: The library name
  basedir=$1
  libname=$2
  find "$basedir" \
    \( -perm -100 -o -perm -010 -o -perm -001 \) \
    \( -type f -o -type l \) \
    -exec sh -c '
# Arg 0: Is a dummy _ for this inline script
# Arg 1: The executable file path
# Arg 2: The library name
filepath=$1
libname=$2
objdump -p "$filepath" 2>/dev/null |
  if grep -qF "  NEEDED               $libname"; then
    printf %s\\n "${filepath##*/}"
  fi
' _ {} "$libname" \;
}

Example usage:

finddepend /bin libselinux.so
mv
systemctl
tar
sed
udevadm
ls
mknod
systemd
mkdir
ss
dir
vdir
cp
systemd-hwdb
netstat

Using the ls command to hide non-executable files

The way to go :

for file in *; do test -x "$file" || echo "$file"; done

Thanks to not parsing ls output

List files with certain extensions with ls and grep

Why not:

ls *.{mp3,exe,mp4}

I'm not sure where I learned it - but I've been using this.

List all executables in the cwd with grep

ls -F | grep -E "[*]\>"

This won't do what you are expecting because * is not a "word" character and looking for an end-of-word boundary immediately after it makes no sense.

ls -F -a | grep "[*]$"

Will yield all lines ending with * as specified. This makes sense.

You should heed @Adam's advice: You should not parse the output of ls.

---

Related Topics