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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?
The command strings will extract all ascii data from a file, if you then grep its output, you can search for your data:
strings <filename> | grep "search text"
strings -f would be more appropriate.
Jul 24, 2015 at 9:51
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).
ack's self-description? (in the manual) "ack 2.x will search through every regular, non-binary file that is not explicitly ignored [by blah blah]" So it sounds like ack 2.x should still stop reading a file early if the contents look binary.
Jul 24, 2015 at 4:09
ack grep /bin/grep and you will get the result. I updated my answer to prevent confusing.
Your question is about find binary files that contain a pattern (and we have already very good answers!). Complementary we may like to get the occurrences.
I often use
grep -aPo '.{0,20}pattern.{0,20}' binfile
to get a surrounding context of 20-char.
