Strings (Unix)

The correct title of this article is strings. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

In computer software, strings is a program in Unix-like operating systems that prints the strings found in an executable.

It can be used on object files, and core dumps.

Common usage includes piping it to grep and fold or redirecting the output to a file.

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

[edit] Example

$ strings foobar
Qåtd
/lib/ld-linux.so.2
_Jv_RegisterClasses
__gmon_start__
libc.so.6
puts
_IO_stdin_used
__libc_start_main
GLIBC_2.0
...

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Process management:	anacron \| at \| chroot \| crontab \| kill \| killall \| nice \| pgrep \| pidof \| pkill \| ps \| sleep \| screen \| time \| timex \| top \| wait
User Management/Environment:	env \| finger \| id \| locale \| mesg \| passwd \| su \| sudo \| uname \| uptime \| w \| wall \| who \| whoami \| write
Text processing:	awk \| cut \| diff \| ex \| head \| iconv \| join \| less \| more \| nkf \| paste \| sed \| sort \| tail \| tr \| uniq \| wc \| xargs
Shell programming:	echo \| expr \| printf \| unset	Printing:	lp
Communications: inetd \| netstat \| ping \| rlogin \| traceroute	Searching: find \| grep \| strings	Miscellaneous: banner \| bc \| cal \| man \| size \| yes