You are correct in noting that you need to use strings when looking for a string in a binary file. The grep utility is only defined to work on text files. This may not be highly efficient, but it...
Hey,
This how I do it at work
uname -a
This will give you output like this:
SunOS [servername] 5.# Generic_122300-59 sun4u SUNW,Sun-fire-V210
The 5.# gives you the OS version 5.9 for Solaris 9...