Display Human-Readable File Sizes in Find Results – How to Guide

To filter out the human-readable file names, you can make use of the [:print:] (printable) character class name. You will find more about such classes in the manual for grep.

find . -type f -size 1033c -name "[[:print:]]*" ! -executable

On a second thought, the "human-readable" requirement might refer to the file's content, instead of its name. In other words, you would be searching for text files. That is a little more tricky. As @D_Bye suggested in a comment, you should then use the file command to determine the file content type. But it would not be a good idea to run file after a pipe, because it would complicate the task of displaying the file's name. Here's what I suggest:

find . -type f -size 1033c ! -executable -exec sh -c 'file -b $0 | grep -q text' {} \; -print

This is briefly how the file-part works:

• The -exec predicate executes sh -c 'file -b $0 | grep -q text' FILENAME for each FILENAME that satisfies all the previous conditions (type, size, non-executable).
• For each of those files, a shell (sh) runs this short script: file -b $0 | grep -q text, replacing $0 with the filename.
• The file program determines the content type of each file and outputs this information. The -b option prevents printing the name of each tested file.
• grep filters the output coming from file program, searching for lines containing "text". (See for yourself, how a typical output of the file command looks like.)
• But grep does not output the filtered text, because it has the -q (quiet) option given. What it does, is just change its exit status to either 0 (which represents "true" - the filtered text was found) or 1 (meaning "error" - the text "text" did not appear in the output from file).
• The true/false exit status coming from grep is passed further by sh to find and acts as the final result of the whole "-exec sh -c 'file $0 | grep -q text' {} \;" test.
• In case the above test returned true, the -print command is executed (i.e. the name of the tested file is printed).

Yes, you can use find to look for non-executable files of the right size and then use file to check for ASCII. Something like:

find . -type f -size 1033c ! -executable -exec file {} + | grep ASCII

The question, however, isn't as simple as it sounds. 'Human readable' is a horribly vague term. Presumably, you mean text. OK, but what kind of text? Latin character ASCII only? Full Unicode? For example, consider these three files:

$ cat file1
abcde
$ cat file2
αβγδε
$ cat file3
abcde
αβγδε
$ cat file4
#!/bin/sh
echo foo

These are all text and human readable. Now, let's see what file makes of them:

$ file *
file1: ASCII text
file2: UTF-8 Unicode text
file3: UTF-8 Unicode text
file4: POSIX shell script, ASCII text executable

So, the find command above will only find file1 (for the sake of this example, let's imagine those files had 1033 characters). You could expand the find to look for the string text:

find . -type f -size 1033c ! -executable -exec file {} + | grep -w text

With the -w, grep will only print lines where text is found as a stand-alone word. That should be pretty close to what you want, but I can't guarantee that there is no other file type whose description might also include the string text.