Search binary file grep

Braiam A note for other commands that do not support such a variable: You can set default options by defining an alias in your. This can actually be very useful. For example, I was searching for the unity version of a project, and couldn't remember which file it was kept in. I searched for the format of the version, and it came up with some binary files that matches. It turned out as it was pre-version 5, the version was only present in a binary file, so without the binary match, I might have missed it.

FYI There's a tool ack which is kind of "better than grep". Ack doesn't search binary files. In Debian, it comes under the name "ack-grep". Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Dennis Kaarsemaker Dennis Kaarsemaker 7, 3 3 gold badges 27 27 silver badges 28 28 bronze badges. The fgrep command does not use regular expressions.

The term grep means to globally search for a regular expression and print all lines containing it. The options that you use with the grep command can modify your search. Each option except the -w option can be used with the egrep and fgrep commands. The hex dumps normally end up in total megs-ish. Perl COULD be a option, but at this point, I would assume my lack of knowledge with bash and its tools is the main culprit.

Problem is, when I try to search for hex values, I get the problem of if just not searching for the hex values, so if I search for 00 I should get like a million hits, because thats always the blankspace, but instead its searching for 00 as text, so in hex, Any idea's? I CAN force it through hexdump or something of the link but because its a stream it will not give me the offsets and filename that it found a match in. Using grep -b option doesnt seem to work either, I did try all the flags that seemed useful to my situation, and nothing worked.

There's also a pretty handy tool called binwalk , written in python, which provides for binary pattern matching and quite a lot more besides. Here's how you would search for a binary string, which outputs the offset in decimal and hex from the docs :.

Note that using a simple search target like 'DF' will incorrectly match characters that span across byte boundaries, i. The grep -P can be useful however to just find files matrching a given binary pattern. Or to do a binary query of a pattern that actually happens in text see for example How to regexp CJK ideographs in utf I am just piping the result to less because the character I am greping for does not print well and the less displays the results cleanly.

Output example:. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Using grep to search for hex strings in a file Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 7 months ago. Active 11 months ago. Viewed k times. Someone must have had this problem and a workaround.

What can I do? To clarify, I have a series of dumped memory regions from GDB. This also lets you grep multiple files and keep the file name reference in the output. Show 1 more comment.

You could run the data file through cat -v , e. Michael Hoffmann 2, 2 2 gold badges 21 21 silver badges 40 40 bronze badges. Solved my problem. Note that this works in a pipeline as well. Why use this if grep --text works? This seems a lot more complex. So if you have that in your binary file, grep will exit early. You can use "strings" to extract strings from a binary file, for example strings binary. Worked well for me as the source was a debug log with UID on each line.

Thanks for your answer. Saved my day : — Shekhar. I appreciate paxdiablo 's answer but for a quick answer and getting on with the job you cannot fault this. Tried to use paxdiablo solution however it didn't give me any of the results I was expecting.

A B A B 7, 2 2 gold badges 28 28 silver badges 33 33 bronze badges. If you use --only-matching , and your regex does not match arbitrary binary data, you won't have a problem. Anyway, thanks. If you want to change this behavior, you can: use --text. This will ensure that only newlines are line terminators use --null-data. This will ensure that only null bytes are line terminators.