NAME

strings − find printable strings in an object file or binary

SYNOPSIS

strings [ − ] [ −o ] [ −number ] filename ...

DESCRIPTION

strings looks for ASCII strings in a binary file.  A string is any sequence of 4 or more printing characters ending with a NEWLINE or a null character. 

strings is useful for identifying random object files and many other things. 

OPTIONS

− Look everywhere in the file for strings.  If this flag is omitted, strings only looks in the initialized data space of object files. 

−o Precede each string by its offset in the file. 

−number
Use number as the minimum string length rather than 4. 

SEE ALSO

od(1V)

NOTES

strings is not 8-bit clean because it makes too many mistakes when it is expected to look for strings containing non-ASCII characters. 

BUGS

The algorithm for identifying strings is extremely primitive. 

Solbourne Computer, Inc.  —  12 Dec 1990