The software that made the disk image (what ever that software was), will have a "restore" function that re-creates the original disk represented by the disk image. That means among other things that there will be a file system instead of a huge single "thing" consisting of just a bunch of bits in a possibly proprietary format. So first step is to re-create the original disk on a new disk or some file system partition, etc.

Once you have something like that, you can think about writing code that searches this collection of files (a directory is just a special kind of file) for what you want. At this point, I have no idea of what you really want to do.

Hi Marshall, Well the idea is to take a dd image of a 1GB USB drive in Ubuntu and then mount it. Once mounted, I would like the script to be able to search for particular strings of data. Hope that helps.

Nathan_84:

If you're going to mount it, you needn't worry about the fact that it's an image--once mounted it will just be a tree of files like any other. If you just want to directly scan the image file, you don't even need perl, try:

grep -a your_image_file_name

...roboticus

Ok. It appears that you can take this dd image and create a mount point with all the files, e.g. a file system structure at a Linux file system mount point.

Look at http://perldoc.perl.org/File/Find.html and take a stab at it. It is tricky to get this "right", but try it with a good explanation of what you are trying do and you will get lot's of help.

Are you taking about OCR?