Re: [tlug] binary search of binary data

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Edward" == Edward Wright <edw@example.com> writes:

    Edward> I use grep -ab for searching thru the file for text
    Edward> strings, but I couldn't see how to pass a binary search
    Edward> pattern to grep. Am I missing something simple here?

That's not a grep problem, that's a shell problem!<0.9wink>

I can think of a number of ways to deal with this.  First, almost all
shells/terminal drivers allow entry of binary characters in some way,
for example use ^V<control character> for the low range and ALT-###
for the high range.  Some shells will interpret octal escapes for you,
although I believe bash doesn't.  Recent GNU greps support a
--perl-regexp (-P) option; I don't know if that implies processing
Perl string escapes, it may not.  There's always the -f option to take
the search pattern from a file.

Finally, you can use 'grep -e `printf ...`'.

Unix rules, even when it sucks!

None of these are particularly satisfactory, which is why I suggested
doing the whole thing in <scripted-language-with-initial-character-p-
or-r-at-your-option>.  (You could even use awk, etc.)


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