bgrep

I'm terribly annoyed by the fact that grep(1) cannot look for binary strings. I'm even more annoyed by the fact that a simple search for "binary grep" doesn't yield a tool which could do that. So I wrote one.

Feel free to modify, branch, fork, improve.

Building

make

Installing

make install # to /user/local/bin, or
make install PREFIX=~/.local

Or, if you need it quickly,

curl -L 'https://github.com/tmbinc/bgrep/raw/main/bgrep.c' | gcc -O2 -x c -o $HOME/.local/bin/bgrep -

Usage

bgrep [-r] [-B bytes] [-A bytes] [-C bytes] <hex> [<path> [...]]
bgrep [-r] -f <pattern> [-m <mask>] [<path> [...]]

Option	Description
-B <bytes>	print <bytes> of context before each match
-A <bytes>	print <bytes> of context after each match
-C <bytes>	print <bytes> of context before and after a match
-r	recurse into directories
-f <file>	read the search pattern from a file instead of <hex>
-m <file>	read a mask file (wildcard bytes for the pattern)

When no path is given, bgrep reads from standard input.

Examples

Search a file for the byte sequence 0x42 0x42 0x42:

bgrep 424242 firmware.bin

Recurse through a directory:

bgrep -r 424242 ./images

License

BSD 2-Clause. See LICENSE.