Using grep to search for hex strings in a file

Question

I have been trying all day to get this to work. Does anyone know how to get grep, or something of the like, to retrieve offsets of hex strings in a file?

I have a bu

Answer 1

We tried several things before arriving at an acceptable solution:

xxd -u /usr/bin/xxd | grep 'DF'
00017b0: 4010 8D05 0DFF FF0A 0300 53E3 0610 A003  @.........S.....


root# grep -ibH "df" /usr/bin/xxd
Binary file /usr/bin/xxd matches
xxd -u /usr/bin/xxd | grep -H 'DF'
(standard input):00017b0: 4010 8D05 0DFF FF0A 0300 53E3 0610 A003  @.........S.....

Then found we could get usable results with

xxd -u /usr/bin/xxd > /tmp/xxd.hex ; grep -H 'DF' /tmp/xxd

Note that using a simple search target like 'DF' will incorrectly match characters that span across byte boundaries, i.e.

xxd -u /usr/bin/xxd | grep 'DF'
00017b0: 4010 8D05 0DFF FF0A 0300 53E3 0610 A003  @.........S.....
--------------------^^

So we use an ORed regexp to search for ' DF' OR 'DF ' (the searchTarget preceded or followed by a space char).

The final result seems to be

xxd -u -ps -c 10000000000 DumpFile > DumpFile.hex
egrep ' DF|DF ' Dumpfile.hex

0001020: 0089 0424 8D95 D8F5 FFFF 89F0 E8DF F6FF  ...$............
-----------------------------------------^^
0001220: 0C24 E871 0B00 0083 F8FF 89C3 0F84 DF03  .$.q............
--------------------------------------------^^