STRINGS

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: December 3, 1986
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NAME

strings - find the printable strings in a file

SYNOPSIS

strings [ -ao ] [ -number ] [ file ... ]

DESCRIPTION

Strings looks for ascii strings in each of the specified files, or from the standard input. A string is any sequence of 4 or more printing characters. Unless the -a flag is given, strings only looks in the initialized data space of object files. If the -o flag is given, then each string is preceded by its decimal offset in the file. If the -number flag is given, then number is used as the minimum string length rather than 4.

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

BUGS

The algorithm for identifying strings is extremely primitive.