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How should I locate all 32bit programs on my system ? I'm running a 64bit OS.

(There might be some , but I forget)

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2 Answers

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This is kinda crude, but should do the trick

find / -mount -type f -perm /111 -exec sh -c 'objdump -f {} | grep -q elf32 && echo {}' \;
  • -mount keeps us on the / filesystem
  • -type f restricts it to files only
  • -perm /111 restricts it to files with the executable bit
  • then we run objdump -f on the file and echo the file name if objdump contains elf32

The first 3 filters are just so we narrow the results a bit and arent running objdump on every single thing.

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1) find $(echo $PATH|sed -e 's/:/ /g') will make it faster go; 2) -mount is kinda obsolete, it's -xdev now; 3) objdump takes bunch of files okay, so it's better feed it with them, reducing costs of exec calls: objdump -f /bin/echo /bin/date |fgrep elf64 → /bin/echo: file format elf64-x86-64 /bin/date: file format elf64-x86-64 – poige Jun 13 '12 at 3:58
Yeah, forgotten my favorite: avoid using grep when fgrep suffices — unix.stackexchange.com/questions/21020/… – poige Jun 13 '12 at 4:00
poige, you should issue your own answer with those modifications. – JodieC Jun 13 '12 at 4:50
@poige (1) restricts it too much in my opinion, -mount is more compatible than -xdev, doing it a file at a time makes it cleaner to show just the matching file name. – Patrick Jun 13 '12 at 12:03
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If you guys want to keep arguing about this, take it to chat; comments aren't good for this sort of thing – Michael Mrozek♦ Jun 14 '12 at 17:19
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This will take forever:

find /|parallel -n100 file {}|grep "ELF 32.*executable"

It should work though. You'll need to make sure you have GNU parallel installed

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Running in parallel isn't a good idea here: this is an I/O-bound task, having multiple processes competing for the filesystem is more likely to slow the execution down. If you have several disks, you can get a speedup by running a separate find for each disk. Even with RAID-1, find is competing with file to some extent, but maybe parallel -n2 file would speed up a little. – Gilles Jun 14 '12 at 0:13
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parallel -n100 won't spin off 100 tasks, it will only run one at a time sequentially, and give at most 100 arguments to each instance. See the max-args option in the GNU parallel man page – JodieC Jun 14 '12 at 1:01
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Oh, sorry, yes. No point in invoking parallel if you're not going to use parallelism though. – Gilles Jun 14 '12 at 1:06
Parallel has much better handling of special filenames. For instance, find /|xargs -n100 -i file {} would throw errors on the first filename with a single quote in it, while GNU parallel will happily plod along. – JodieC Jun 14 '12 at 1:09
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find / -exec file {} + – Gilles Jun 14 '12 at 1:10
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