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Ethan Heilman
Asked: 2009-08-08 06:20:19 +0800 CST

Linux Command to find Strings in Binary or non ascii file

  • 772

Is there any linux command to extracts all the ascii strings from an executable or other binary file? I suppose I could do it with a grep, but I remember hearing somewhere that such a command existed?

linux grep binary strings

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The command you are looking for is strings

    Its name is quite self-explanatory, it retrieves any printable string from a given file.

    man strings gives:

    STRINGS(1)

    NAME
    strings - find the printable strings in a object, or other binary, file

    SYNOPSIS
    strings [ - ] [ -a ] [ -o ] [ -t format ] [ -number ] [ -n number ] [--] [file ...]

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  2. The strings command is the way to go for this particular type of problems. Sometimes you also have to pipe it out to grep.

    For example: 

    strings somebinaryfile | grep textuwanttofind
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  3. The command does exist, and is called.... strings!

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  4. A problem with using strings is that you don't see surrounding non printables and you have to be careful with the minimum string length.

    A problem using 

    od -c FILE
    or 
    hexdump -C FILE
    is that a sequence can be difficult to find if it wraps a line.

    Something I like a lot for this is ZTreeWin running in WINE on Linux - you can do a lot with it but the searching in any file or editing binaries can be particularly useful.

    The awesome ytree package is available for many Linux and Unix variants and has a good Hex dump view of any file but doesn't have the search that ZTreeWin (and its 16bit predecessor, XTree) have.

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  5. The od command can do this:

    od -c *filename*
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