Equivalent command to grep binary files

grep

I have a bunch of binaries and I know that inside these binaries there are strings I want to find.

I want to do a:

grep -lir "the string I am looking for"

and get a list of all binaries inside a particular directory that contain that string but grep -lir is apparently not working with these files.

Is there a command that can do this kind of search from terminal?

Best Answer

With GNU grep, you can use -a option to make it treats binary files as text files:

grep -ali -- string file

If your grep version does not support -a, you can use ack instead. With ack 1.x, you need to include -a option, with ack 2.x, you don't, since when searching include non-text file by default (only ignored non-text file when you did not specify any files).

Related Solutions

grep – Searching for a string in files recursively

grep -H -R searchstring /directory

may want to redirect the results to a file (or tee)

You may also want to look at ack

Stop grep after Nth files matched

You can pipe grep result to head.

Note, that in order to ensure stopping after Nth match, you need to using stdbuf to make sure grep don't buffer its output:

stdbuf -oL grep -rl 'pattern' * | head -n10

As soon as head consumed 10 lines, it terminated and grep will receive SIGPIPE because it still output something to pipe while head was gone.

This assumed that no file names contain newline.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

grep – Searching for a string in files recursively

Stop grep after Nth files matched

Related Question