searching through a binary file

mccareth · 04-08-2002, 04:29 PM

Hi there,

I'm pretty new to doing command line coding for Linux so if this is actually an easy question, please just bare with me. I'm trying to figure out how to search a binary file to find keywords, such as a person's last name a such. I'm not even sure if this is possible. I was trying to do it on the /var/log/wtmp and in the man pages it says that it is binary. If you could help out, I would be very appreciative.

-mccareth

:smash:

jeremy · 04-08-2002, 04:45 PM

You can use the strings command for this.

--jeremy

mccareth · 04-08-2002, 05:27 PM

Hmmmm.... This doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for. the /var/log/wtmp is used to do the last command. I was hoping to be able to search that file for something like last month's log in entries. Unfortunately, last usually pulls up just the current months info. I want to get any month past from linux.

jeremy · 04-08-2002, 05:51 PM

Oh... you just said you wanted to search through a binary file.

Your wtmp probably got rotated. Go to /var/log and look for wtmp.1 (or something similar). Then type "last -f wtmp.1".

--jeremy