Often it is useful to be able to search the contents of system memory, for example to check if a program you are running stores your password unencrypted in memory.
The following command combines dd, strings and grep to search the system memory for character strings, and searches those results for those matching SearchString. Because /dev/mem does not have public read permissions, you must run the command from a root terminal.
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If you have ever copied data from one disk to another using dd, you will have noticed that dd has no progress bar, no ETA, no information at all until the process has completed. This can be troublesome if you are copying large partitions that are likely to take a few hours.
I found a little program called pv that solves that problem. pv allows you to see into the pipe and see what is going on with your copy process.
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