Is there a program which can count occurrence of a certain string in a binary file?

Question

I have a binary file and I need to count occurrences of certain string in this file or even list then with offsets. In windows or Linux (for this task I use Fedora 12 and w2k).

Answer 1

On Linux with GNU grep:

grep -F --text -o --byte-offset mystring binaryfile

Example:

$ grep -F --text -o --byte-offset option /bin/tar
226542:option
237529:option
237612:option
...

Explanation of the parameters:

-F, --fixed-strings
      Interpret PATTERN as a list of fixed strings, separated by newlines,
      any of which is to be matched.  (-F is specified by POSIX.)

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

-o, --only-matching
      Print  only the matched (non-empty) parts of a matching line, with
      each such part on a separate output line.

-b, --byte-offset
      Print the 0-based byte offset within the input file before each line
      of output. If -o (--only-matching) is specified, print the offset of
      the matching part itself

To count the occurrences add | wc -l to the command line.

Answer 2

Agent Ransack - Free File Searching Utility

• Immediate results Found text is shown with highlighted keywords so you don't need to waste time opening each file looking for the
  right information.

• Boolean expressions Combine search terms using the familiar Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT.

• Office formats Support for popular Office formats including Office 2007 and OpenOffice.
• Perl regex Support for Perl compatible regular expressions.
• 64-bit Version Natively compiled 64-bit version for improved compatibility.
• Fast searching Highly efficient search algorithms mean that you spend less time waiting for results.
• Printing and Exporting Results can be shared with others through printing and exporting.

Answer 3

In Linux, you can use strings -a [filename] | grep [string] | wc -l

In Windows, you can use the strings * | findstr /i [string], with the strings utility from Sysinternals.