Strings

strings is a standard Unix utility that searches out all of the human-readable strings of characters in a file and prints them to the standard output. It is a great first line tool for reverse engineering a binary. Example usage:

 strings <binary_program>

By default, strings will output all strings that are 4 characters or longer. this can result in a lot of noise. If you know you only care about strings that are 12 characters or longer, use the -n option:

 strings -n 12 <binary_program>