3 ms·

I'm confused, grep has bianary options. grep -U

• mysterypie 9y ago
  The only thing the -U does is to not strip carriage returns embedded in the file. But if you do, for example, grep NSA_KEY suspiciousfile.exe, you're either going to get: (a) "Binary file suspiciousfile.exe matches" (which is what I get on the particular system I tried it on, and I'd call that semi-useful because I'd like to see some context around it) or possibly, (b) a 50,000-character gibberish output to your shell containing somewhere within it the string "NSA_KEY" if you can possibly scroll through it to see where it appeared. I think strings, or this bingrep, or some other binary-aware strings-like tool is better.
  • an27 9y ago
    Unless you use -o/--only-matching, that works fine for binaries!