bgrep - search for binary strings in binary files¶
bgrep is a utility for searching for occurrences of binary strings within binary files. As its name suggests, its interface and design is modeled after the ubiquitous “grep” command, used to search for occurrences of text patterns in text files.
Although binary data is not very friendly for mere humans to read, often there are patterns, especially ASCII 7-bit string sequences, mixed in between raw binary bytes and those strings can be of interest. Therefore, one of the main uses for bgrep is to search for ASCII character sequences embedded in binary files. One could instead open the file in a text editor or hex editor, but if a quick glance or search is all you want then bgrep meets that need.
bgrep is written in the Python programming language. Although Python is often thought of as a “toy” language or a language only for the web, it is actually a perfect language for writing such a tool. At its core, the operations that bgrep performs are high-level, and “going native” doesn’t provide enough of a speed increase to warrent the maintenance overhead and difficulty of writing and debugging portable C code. Well, that’s my opinion anyways!
bgrep is written by Denver Coneybeare (denver@sleepydragon.org). The online documentation is available at http://bgrep.readthedocs.org. The home page for Sleepy Dragon Software where official releases are published is http://www.sleepydragon.org. The source code for bgrep is hosted at GitHub at https://github.com/sleepydragonsw/bgrep.