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

One way to solve your immediate problem using only grep is to create a file containing a single null byte. After that, grep -abo -f null_byte_file target_file will produce the following output.

0:
1:
2:
3:
8:
11:

That is of course each byte offset as requested by "-b" followed by a null byte as requested by "-o"

I'd be the first to advocate perl, but in this case there's no need to bring in the extended family.