Find the offset of data in a binary file

Question

Is there a Linux command-line tool (like grep) that can take a binary file and a series of bytes and return the first index where these bytes appear in the file?

Answer 1

$ grep --only-matching --byte-offset --max-count=1 --text --perl-regexp "\xefa" pathtofile

22157929:ïa

Outputs offset in bytes (start with 0) along with found text, e.g. \xefa searchs for byte with hex code xe followed by char a, --max-count how many occurrences to find. Works on my Linux Mint.

Answer 2

You can use xxd to create a hexdump of the binary files and search that.