strings is a shell command that extracts printable character strings from a file – which is particular useful for analyzing the content of a binary file. By definition, a binary file contains data that is not printable text yet a binary file often does contain some printable character text – often in relatively short sequences distributed throughout the file. These portions of the binary file can be informative as to what the file contains overall. For a text file, a file containing all printable characters, the command prints the entire file content, and therefore, provides no utility over more commonly used file output commands such as cat.