Grep : How to grep for strings inside binary data
Grep or Global Regular Expression Print is a very useful Unix/Linux command that I've practically used everyday. So, recently a co-worker asked me how to grep
for a piece of string inside binary data files ?
for example, there is a binary file
printf "\x01 text \x00\r\ntext\r\n\x02text text\r\n\x92" > data.bin
What he wanted is to grep for the 'text' string for the data.bin file
To do that, use the cat
command with -v
flag
From the cat
man page:
-v Display non-printing characters so they are visible. Control characters print as ^X' for control-X; the delete character (octal 0177) prints as `^?.
Non-ASCII characters (with the high bit set) are printed as `M-' (for meta) followed by the character for the low 7 bits.
without the -v
flag, the grep result will look something like this
cat data.bin | grep text
Binary file (standard input) matches
therefore, use cat -v
before passing the result to grep
cat -v data.bin | grep text
^A text ^@^M
text^M
^Btext text^M
Hope this short tutorial on greping for strings inside binary data file can be useful to you.
By Adam Ng
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