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What have you done to strings!

Russell Fulton r.fulton@auckland.ac.nz
Tue Oct 28 19:49:00 GMT 2014 
Hi folks,

I have just read that gnu version of string is a whole lot ‘smarter’ than one might have imagined.  I had no idea that it used libbfd on target files.  I regularly use strings on suspected malicious file in the naive belief that it was simply running through the file looking for contiguous strings of ascii chars.  

Add functionality like smart parsing and decoding of executables by all means but *please* don’t make it default.

Russell (who has been using strings for around 30 years and has never felt the need to check the man page to find out that the behaviour has changed)

Russell
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