This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual. The Linux implementation of this interface

       By default the data area (as opposed to the text, ``bss'', or header areas) of a binary  executable  file
       is scanned. Implementations document which areas are scanned.

       Some  historical  implementations do not require NUL or <newline> terminators for strings to permit those
       languages that do not use NUL as a string terminator to have their strings written.

       Default.

       Default.

       Thefollowingsectionsareinformative.

       Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form from IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, Standard
       for  Information  Technology  --  Portable  Operating  System  Interface  (POSIX),  The  Open  Group Base
       Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, Copyright (C) 2018 by the Institute of Electrical  and  Electronics
       Engineers, Inc and The Open Group.  In the event of any discrepancy between this version and the original
       IEEE  and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document.
       The original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .

       Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page are most likely to have  been  introduced
       during   the   conversion  of  the  source  files  to  man  page  format.  To  report  such  errors,  see
       https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .

IEEE/The Open Group                                   2017                                       STRINGS(1POSIX)

       The  strings  utility  shall look for printable strings in regular files and shall write those strings to
       standard output. A printable string is any sequence of four (by default)  or  more  printable  characters
       terminated by a <newline> or NUL character. Additional implementation-defined strings may be written; see
       localedef.

       If the first argument is '-', the results are unspecified.

       The following environment variables shall affect the execution of strings:

       LANG      Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See the
                 Base  Definitions  volume  of POSIX.1‐2017, Section8.2, InternationalizationVariables for the
                 precedence  of  internationalization  variables  used  to  determine  the  values   of   locale
                 categories.)

       LC_ALL    If  set  to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization
                 variables.

       LC_CTYPE  Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text  data  as  characters
                 (for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments and input files) and
                 to identify printable strings.

       LC_MESSAGES
                 Determine  the  locale  that  should  be  used  to affect the format and contents of diagnostic
                 messages written to standard error.

       NLSPATH   Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES.

       None.

       The following exit values shall be returned:

        0    Successful completion.

       >0    An error occurred.

       None.

       None.

       The input files named by the utility arguments or the standard  input  shall  be  regular  files  of  any
       format.

       strings — find printable strings in files

       The following operand shall be supported:

       file      A  pathname of a regular file to be used as input. If no file operand is specified, the strings
                 utility shall read from the standard input.

       The  strings  utility shall conform to the Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Section12.2, UtilitySyntaxGuidelines, except for the unspecified usage of '-'.

       The following options shall be supported:

       -a        Scan files in their entirety. If -a is not specified, it is implementation-defined what portion
                 of each file is scanned for strings.

       -nnumber Specify the minimum string length, where the number argument is a positive decimal integer. The
                 default shall be 4.

       -tformat Write each string preceded by its byte offset from the start of the file. The format  shall  be
                 dependent on the single character used as the format option-argument:

                 d     The offset shall be written in decimal.

                 o     The offset shall be written in octal.

                 x     The offset shall be written in hexadecimal.

       None.

       This  manual  page  is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual.  The Linux implementation of this interface
       may differ (consult the corresponding Linux manual page for details of Linux behavior), or the  interface
       may not be implemented on Linux.

       Apart from rationalizing the option syntax and slight difficulties  with  object  and  executable  binary
       files,  strings  is specified to match historical practice closely. The -a and -n options were introduced
       to replace the  non-conforming  -  and  -number  options.  These  options  are  no  longer  specified  by
       POSIX.1‐2008 but may be present in some implementations.

       The  -o  option  historically  means  different  things on different implementations. Some use it to mean
       ``offset in decimal'', while others use it as ``offset in octal''. Instead of trying to decide which  way
       would be least objectionable, the -t option was added. It was originally named -O to mean ``offset'', but
       was changed to -t to be consistent with od.

       The  ISO C  standard  function  isprint()  is  restricted  to  a domain of unsignedchar.  This volume of
       POSIX.1‐2017 requires implementations to write strings as defined by the current locale.

localedef, nm

       The Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter8,  EnvironmentVariables,  Section12.2,  UtilitySyntaxGuidelines

       The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.

       See the INPUT FILES section.

       Strings found shall be written to the standard output, one per line.

       When the -t option is not specified, the format of the output shall be:

           "%s", <string>

       With the -to option, the format of the output shall be:

           "%o %s", <byteoffset>, <string>

       With the -tx option, the format of the output shall be:

           "%x %s", <byteoffset>, <string>

       With the -td option, the format of the output shall be:

           "%d %s", <byteoffset>, <string>

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