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
IF you gain some knowledge or the information here solved your programming problem. Please consider donating to the less fortunate or some charities that you like. Apart from donation, planting trees, volunteering or reducing your carbon footprint will be great too.
Advertisement
Tutorials
+5.4k Golang : fmt.Println prints out empty data from struct
+11.4k Golang : Intercept and process UNIX signals example
+6.3k Golang : Get Hokkien(福建话)/Min-nan(閩南語) Pronounciations
+28.6k Golang : Change a file last modified date and time
+12.1k Golang : Clean formatting/indenting or pretty print JSON result
+18.7k Golang : Iterating Elements Over A List
+11k Golang : Replace a parameter's value inside a configuration file example
+8.4k Golang : Count leading or ending zeros(any item of interest) example
+6.9k Mac/Linux/Windows : Get CPU information from command line
+7.8k Golang : Error reading timestamp with GORM or SQL driver
+8.2k Golang : Routes multiplexer routing example with regular expression control
+21.3k Golang : Clean up null characters from input data