strings (Unix)

Not to be confused with string (computing).

In computer software, strings is a program in Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and Unix-like operating systems that finds and prints the strings of printable characters in files. The files can be of regular text files or binary files such as executables. It can be used on object files and core dumps. strings is mainly useful for determining the contents of non-text files.

strings

The strings command
Written in	C
Operating system	Unix, Unix-like, Plan 9, Inferno
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Command
License	Plan 9: MIT License

Overview

Strings are recognized by looking for sequences of at least 4 (by default) printable characters terminating in a NUL character (that is, null-terminated strings). Some implementations provide options for determining what is recognized as a printable character, which is useful for finding non-ASCII and wide character text. By default, it only prints the strings from the initialized and loaded sections of object files; for other types of files, it prints the strings from the whole file. With regular text files, strings and cat give different output. cat outputs the non printable characters but strings does not.

strings is part of the GNU Binary Utilities (binutils), and has been ported to other operating systems including Windows.

Example

Using strings to print sequences of characters that are at least 8 characters long (this command prints the system's BIOS information; should be run as root):

dd if=/dev/mem bs=1k skip=768 count=256 2>/dev/null | strings -n 8 | less

See also

• Cat (Unix)
• Paste (Unix)
• GNU Debugger
• Strip (Unix)

External links

• strings – Shell and Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX Specification, Version 4 from The Open Group
• strings(1) – Plan 9 Programmer's Manual, Volume 1
• strings(1) – Inferno General commands Manual

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