How to extract text portion of a binary file in linux/bash?

Question

I have a binary file. If I open it with vi, it shows sequences of human-readable text and binary characters. What is the best way to extract the human-readable portion only using bash?

I was thinking, maybe we can do this over a grep or sed pattern?

$ cat file1.bin | grep '????'  > newfile.txt

Answer 1

If you're on a Debian distro, you can probably get radare2 (r2) with just sudo apt install radare2.

After you've installed r2, either with apt, some other installer on some other distro, or by following an online guide, you can use rabin2 to extract just the text part of a binary:

$ rabin2 -z your_binary

This is often "better" than just strings because it outputs just the useful .data section of the binary. Stuff outside that section isn't always very useful.

Answer 2

Use the strings utility - that's exactly what it's designed for.