Is there a Windows equivalent of the Unix "strings" command?

strings in Unix and Linux extracts printable strings from a binary file. Is there a version of this for Windows? I couldn't find one.

johnny

Posted 2010-03-25T17:18:40.090

Reputation: 1 783

Answers

Not (AFAIK) built in, but there is one available from SysInternals (live link). The SysInternals strings isn't a straight port of the Unix tool; it was written to find Unicode strings as well as ASCII:

Working on NT and Win2K means that executables and object files will many times have embedded UNICODE strings that you cannot easily see with a standard ASCII strings or grep programs.

sgmoore

Posted 2010-03-25T17:18:40.090

Reputation: 5 961

I believe MinGW contains a Windows version of GNU binutils, which in turn contains the strings program. You could try that.

sleske

Posted 2010-03-25T17:18:40.090

Reputation: 19 887

and of course binutils is included in the Cygwin environment (http://www.cygwin.com/). it doesn't seem to be included in GnuWin32 and UnxUtils, two other ports projects that provide unix utilities on Windows.

– quack quixote – 2010-03-25T18:09:55.240

The Sysinternals tool Strings is a Windows console program which can extract ASCII And Unicode strings from binary files.

General ChaOS

Posted 2010-03-25T17:18:40.090

Reputation: 27

1-1 No need to have 2 answers with the same info. – user66001 – 2017-05-01T13:39:47.710

@slm, in this case, the link is the content. If the link breaks, then no amount of content will be of use since the file can no longer be downloaded. In fact, the original post was actually better than it is now because at least then, it displayed the raw URL which showed that the program in question was from Microsoft and included the keyword sysinternals. Therefore, if the link died, someone could still try to search for the file by using those as a guide. Now, the link is merged into the text so there is nothing indicating what the file is. No worries, I’ll fix it now. – Synetech – 2013-12-15T23:06:24.127

@Synetech - OK. – slm – 2013-12-16T00:15:03.923

For a GUI-oriented alternative try 'Extract Text' in this utility collection by Juan M. Aguirregabiria. Quick and easy to use with persistent customization of which characters to match as strings. Probably doesn't support Unicode though.

http://tp.lc.ehu.es/jma/win95.html

Softpedia link included in case the link above dies http://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/File-Editors/Extract-Text.shtml

persiflage

Posted 2010-03-25T17:18:40.090

Reputation: 121