- What are strings?
- Plain text unicode found inside of a program executable
- Why are the useful?
- Often seeing what unicode is found in a compiled executable will tell you a lot about what is going on, and will do so in much less time than actually decompiling it and evaluating functions.
==Very Related==: [[Saving a CMD command output to a text file windows]]
## How to do it:
> From https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/strings
# Strings v2.54
**By Mark Russinovich**
Published: June 22, 2021
[](https://download.sysinternals.com/files/Strings.zip) [**Download Strings**](https://download.sysinternals.com/files/Strings.zip) **(534 KB)**
## Introduction
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. So we decided to roll our own. Strings just scans the file you pass it for UNICODE (or ASCII) strings of a default length of 3 or more UNICODE (or ASCII) characters. Note that it works under Windows 95 as well.
## Using Strings
**Usage:**
```
strings [-a] [-f offset] [-b bytes] [-n length] [-o] [-q] [-s] [-u] <file or directory>
```
Strings takes wild-card expressions for file names, and additional command line parameters are defined as follows:
| Parameter | Description |
| --------- | ------------------------------------------------ |
| **-a** | Ascii-only search (Unicode and Ascii is default) |
| **-b** | Bytes of file to scan |
| **-f** | File offset at which to start scanning. |
| **-o** | Print offset in file string was located |
| -n | Minimum string length (default is 3) |
| -s | Recurse subdirectories |
| -u | Unicode-only search (Unicode and Ascii is default) |
| -nobanner | Do not display the startup banner and copyright message. |
| | |
To search one or more files for the presence of a particular string using strings use a command like this:
```
strings * | findstr /i TextToSearchFor
```
[](https://download.sysinternals.com/files/Strings.zip) [**Download Strings**](https://download.sysinternals.com/files/Strings.zip) **(534 KB)**
**Runs on:**
- Client: Windows Vista and higher
- Server: Windows Server 2008 and higher
- Nano Server: 2016 and higher