In Cocoa, how would I test if a file is an executable binary? Unfortunately, [NSFileManager isExecutableFileAtPath:] will also return true for scripts and directories, pretty much any file that has the executable bit set which is not what I want.
While doing it in straight-up Cocoa is my preferred approach, a Bash solution that I can easily wrap in an NSTask would be sufficient.
Directories you can filter out easily in code, but knowing what is a binary and what is not is a little hard because, effectively, the only way is to open the file and read it, which is something you need to do yourself.
The main problem, however, is what should be considered a binary.
I have seen executable files that had a dozen text lines in the beginning (so, effectively they were scripts) but then the rest was binary. How would you classify them?
If you are ok to classify them according to how they are loaded, you can try the command file that will try to tell you as precisely as possible what a file is.
I don't know Cocoa, but this is a bash solution:
find ../ -type f -perm +111 | \
xargs -n 1 -I {} file "{}" | grep -v text | cut -d: -f1
