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

The bbe program is a sed-like editor for binary files. See documentation.

Example with bbe:

bbe -b "/\x00\x00\xCC\x00\x00\x00/:17" -s -e "F d" -e "p h" -e "A \n" mydata.bin

11:x00 x00 xcc x00 x00 x00 xcd x00 x00 x00 xce

Explanation

-b search pattern between //. each 2 byte begin with \x (hexa notation).
   -b works like this /pattern/:length (in byte) after matched pattern
-s similar to 'grep -o' suppress unmatched output 
-e similar to 'sed -e' give commands
-e 'F d' display offsets before each result here: '11:'
-e 'p h' print results in hexadecimal notation
-e 'A \n' append end-of-line to each result

You can also pipe it to sed to have a cleaner output:

bbe -b "/\x00\x00\xCC\x00\x00\x00/:17" -s -e "F d" -e "p h" -e "A \n" mydata.bin | sed -e 's/x//g'

11:00 00 cc 00 00 00 cd 00 00 00 ce

Your solution with Perl from your EDIT3 give me an 'Out of memory' error with large files.

The same problem goes with bgrep.

The only downside to bbe is that I don't know how to print context that precedes a matched pattern.