Binary grep on Linux?

Question

Say I have generated the following binary file:

# generate file:
python -c \'import sys;[sys.stdout.write(chr(i)) for i in (0,0,0,0,2,4,6,8,0,1,3,0,5,20)]\'          


        

Answer 1

This seems to work for me:

grep --only-matching --byte-offset --binary --text --perl-regexp "<\x-hex pattern>" 

Short form:

grep -obUaP "<\x-hex pattern>" 

Example:

grep -obUaP "\x01\x02" /bin/grep

Output (Cygwin binary):

153: <\x01\x02>
33210: <\x01\x02>
53453: <\x01\x02>

So you can grep this again to extract offsets. But don't forget to use binary mode again.