A Question About the "Strings" Utility

[lcrowson1]

Gentlemen:

 

I have a (Red Hat) Linux system (but I am not sure of the release number, and I know that I need an upgrade, so my system is certainly not "current").  For my own self-education and amusement I decided to produce a "strings" utility, hoping that it would replicate the version of "strings" which is standard in the Linux system.

 

Of course, my software did not do that.  It did, however, identify quite a number of "strings" embedded in compiled and linked modules.  In fact, there is considerable "overlap" between the results of my software and the results of the standard "strings" utility; in fact, almost all of the strings identified by the standard "strings" utility are produced by my software.  On the other hand, my software BOTH "omits" (a few) strings identified by the standard system utility AND identifies additional strings not identified by the standard system utility.  This, of course, may be due to the definition of what constitutes a "string", but that is not the complete answer.

 

I do not know how to find the source program of the "strings" utility (assuming that I have access to it somewhere on my Linux system).  I would appreciate it if you could tell me how to find the source program (provided that it is included in my system somewhere).  Once I have that information, I shall compare what I have done with the system standard and try to learn how the standard software differs from what I have written.  If it turns out that I can provide an improved version of "strings" to you - one which at least identifies more strings - I shall certainly do that.  Since I am already identifying strings which the system standard utility does not identify, it is clear that there are differences in the definition of what constitutes a string.  Perhaps the strings which I identify should not be considered strings, though, if that is the case, I do not know why it is the case: what I identify as strings certainly seem to be "valid" strings.

 

If you can provide any information about how I can gain access to the source program for the Linux "strings" utility, I will be most grateful.

 

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Lawrence D. (Larry) Crowson

 

P.S: I also have some utilities of my own which it might prove fruitful to "publish" as free software, so I would like some information about how I might do that.  These include a "walk-subtree" module which takes an initial directory as argument (using the default directory as the default argument) and traverses the directory subtree using that directory as "root" and executes in each directory whatever command is specified as the (standard) argument (properly quoted, of course, to provide a UNIX / Linux command as argument).  I believe that this can be a useful tool for system administration.

 

I also have a "what" utility which reports whatever "SCCS" information is embedded in an executable module.  The SCCS methodology seems to be largely passe, but there is certainly a substantial "legacy" of software modules which include it, and this utility can report that.

 

It would be useful / helpful to me if you could tell me something about how I could provide these software tools to you and / or to the Linux community so that others may use them.