The content of binaries can be read with the readelf utility. This even works with ELF files that were built for other hardware architectures:
$ readelf --file-header /bin/ls ELF Header: Magic: 7f 45 4c 46 01 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 Class: ELF32 Data: 2's complement, little endian Version: 1 (current) OS/ABI: UNIX - System V ABI Version: 0 Type: EXEC (Executable file) Machine: Intel 80386 Version: 0x1 Entry point address: 0x8049b40 Start of program headers: 52 (bytes into file) Start of section headers: 76192 (bytes into file) Flags: 0x0 Size of this header: 52 (bytes) Size of program headers: 32 (bytes) Number of program headers: 9 Size of section headers: 40 (bytes) Number of section headers: 29 Section header string table index: 26