Binary grep on Linux?

September 5, 2023 by Tarik

This seems to work for me:

grep --only-matching --byte-offset --binary --text --perl-regexp "<\x-hex pattern>" <file>

Short form:

grep -obUaP "<\x-hex pattern>" <file>

Example:

grep -obUaP "\x01\x02" /bin/grep

Output (Cygwin binary):

153: <\x01\x02>
33210: <\x01\x02>
53453: <\x01\x02>

So you can grep this again to extract offsets. But don’t forget to use binary mode again.