strings (Unix)

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In

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

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

file.txt

a
aa
aaa
aaaa

strings file.txt # prints aaaa

See also

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

References

External links

The Wikibook Guide to Unix has a page on the topic of: Commands

• 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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