strings – Print the strings of printable characters in files.
Summary:
For each file given, strings prints the printable character sequences that are at least 4 characters long & are followed by an unprintable character. Strings is mainly useful for determining the contents of
non-text files.
Example:
$ strings /bin/ls — Prints the strings from initialized & loaded sections.
$ strings -a file — Scan the whole file for the strings.
$ strings -f /bin/* | grep Free — Print Filename before each string.
$ strings -t o file — Print the offset within the file before each string [o = octal, x = hex, d = decimal].
$ strings -n 10 file — Print sequences of characters that are at least 10 characters long (Default 4).
NOTE: Write one “Hello World” Program in C and try this command on the binary file(a.out) of that program.
Read: man strings
strings, odoc, linux, gnu/linux