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

Question

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.

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

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

Solution 3

A quick simple solution:

more < FILE_PATH.exe | findstr "."

This will print all strings from any kind of file ( with a little extra junk ), separated by a new line.

What actually happens is more < FILE_PATH.exe prints an ascii view of FILE_PATH.exe into the console, and the findstr "." filters out anything that isn't a string ( define a minimum length by adding more '.' e.g. findstr "....." will filter for only strings of length 5+ ).

strings -n 4 FILE_PATH => more < FILE_PATH | findstr "...."

strings -n 8 FILE_PATH => more < FILE_PATH | findstr "........"

And of course you can use findstr to make a more exact filter ( see findstr /? )

Solution 4

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

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Comments

[quack quixote]

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

[Synetech]

@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.

[slm]

@Synetech - OK.

[user66001]

-1 No need to have 2 answers with the same info.

[SABA]

how can I use this in Windows 10, please?