Hi, I am looking for a bit of help, I would like to perform a search of all the files in all the directories in the Linux file system looking for a certain word, this word is tests, the thing is I need this to look into Bin files so I was thinking of trying with the nm command and using this with grep, I can't seem to get this to work, is there anyone who can help me. Maybe I could use cat to look into the binary files through the entire directory structure looking as all files that have the specified word and output the results to a file, maybe something like:

cat * | grep -r "tests" > /logfile.log

Thanks in advance

but sincerely I don't know exactly what is the behaviour of grep with binary files. Sometimes I see something like "Binary file ./a.out matches", as result.

It might prove difficult with binaries, since the text strings inside might not be "written" exactly as in regular text files. Hexdump shows, for example, some strings too but sure takes come time anyway, going trough all the files on your system is pretty big a process, at least if you read everything trough for a keyword. It is possible but takes time, so your task has to be important. I wouldn't rely on grep's actions on binary files, though.

Thanks to both of you for such a speedy response, I can now narrow this down to a particular dir /lib so that is the only dir that has the .so binary files that I need to search for the word tests, what would you suggest I use as you guys seem to be the experts and I have little knowledge, but B0uncer you did help me before with the LDAP queries which really worked well, top man.....