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.

SEE ALSO
od(1)

BUGS
The algorithm for identifying strings is extremely primitive.