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I have a file (call it A, for reference) that may be a fragment of some other extant file on my system. I can't use cmp because I don't know how many bytes may be missing from the start of A (or, at least, I can't use it without brute forcing through the -i flag). Is there a way for me to discover whether A is already existent on my system (using GNU tools, or any other linux program)? Or will I have to botch together a c++ program to do the job? Note: efficiency is desirable since the files that A has to be compared with may be numerous.

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Not knowing how big the chunk (A) is ... have you considered grep'ing for its content using -a?

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echo -e "\x00\x11\x22\x33" > file; echo -e "\x00\x11" > snip; grep -a snip file doesn't seem to work – warl0ck Oct 15 '12 at 23:59
No, I hadn't considered grep! That'll do. – Zorawar Oct 16 '12 at 0:09
@warl0ck: grep needs a pattern, so try grep -a "$(cat snip)" file. But, shouldn't there be a problem with echo's newlines? Your example should fail regardless of this correction, shouldn't it? On my system it succeeds... – Zorawar Oct 16 '12 at 0:11
In fact, why use grep -a at all? Can't I just use grep? Taking warl0ck's example, echo -e "\x00\x11\x22\x33" > file; echo -e "\x00\x11Surplus Gibberish" > snip; grep -a "$(cat snip)" file succeeds. Is that expected behaviour? If I remove the -a flag, then the command fails, as I'd want it to. – Zorawar Oct 16 '12 at 0:25
I'd be surprised if that worked. Neither of snip or file is wholly included in the other in your example; I wouldn't expect a match, no matter what method of invocation. – tink Oct 16 '12 at 0:38

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