Arch Linux

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,734

Website

Grep binary ... need to strip illegal chars [SOLVED]

Some how a log file I want to grep I think contains some illegal characters which makes grep think it's a binary and thus I cannot grep it.  What is a good strategy to clean it to pure text?  Googling hasn't turned up anything that works.  I was thinking something in sed but again, found nothing that works.  Thanks.

grep -i banks /scratch/text.log
grep: /scratch/text.log: binary file matches

Last edited by graysky (2021-08-05 00:52:06)

---

AUR packages • Zsh and other configs

2ManyDogs

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2012-01-15

Posts: 4,648

Re: Grep binary ... need to strip illegal chars [SOLVED]

grep -a ?

-a, --text
              Process a binary file as if it were text; this is equivalent to the --binary-files=text option.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,500

Website

Re: Grep binary ... need to strip illegal chars [SOLVED]

grep think it's a binary and thus I cannot grep it.

Na. The problem is you cannot grok it.

grep -i -a banks /scratch/text.log

But if you ever really do need to clean out some characters, I'd use something like the following:

tr -d -c '\t-~' < dirty > clean
# or
tr -d -c '\000-\177' < dirty > clean

EDIT: too slow ... I was looking for a :asci: character class for tr, but it may not have one.

Last edited by Trilby (2021-08-04 22:51:05)

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

edacval

Member

From: .LT

Registered: 2008-10-23

Posts: 98

Re: Grep binary ... need to strip illegal chars [SOLVED]

strings /path | grep 'pattern'

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,734

Website

Re: Grep binary ... need to strip illegal chars [SOLVED]

That -a switch is excellent, thanks.

Trilby - Your tr command fixed it, thanks to you as well.

---

AUR packages • Zsh and other configs