In computer software, strings is a program in Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and Unix-like operating systems that finds and prints the strings of printable characters in files.

With regular text files, strings and cat give different output.

cat outputs the non printable characters but strings does not.

strings is part of the GNU Binary Utilities (binutils), and has been ported to other operating systems including Windows.

[1] Using strings to print sequences of characters that are at least 8 characters long (this command prints the system's BIOS information; should be run as root):