A coworker (on MS Windows) was cursing he couldn't see what symbol names might be hidden in a non-text configuration file for a proprietary, 3rd party tool he has to use. Since I didn't want to risk being constantly asked to "dump symbols" using my Lunix system, I took a few minutes to write the following program in Perl. Made him happy (for now, at least).

Note: The tool being used only supports ASCII characters, so I didn't bother with encodings. Probably didn't need to specify ":bytes" in the open statement, but no harm in doing so.

Maybe others will find this useful.

#!perl

use 5.010_000;
use warnings;
use strict;

if ((@ARGV < 1))
{
    $0 =~ m#([^\\/]+$)#;
    my $name = $1 // $0;
    print STDERR "$name file ...\n" . <<'_DESCRIPTION_';
    Extract ASCII strings from files listed. Multiple files allowed.
_DESCRIPTION_
    exit 1;
}

for my $file (@ARGV)
{
    open my $fh, '<:bytes', $file or die "Error: Can't open '$file': $
+!\n";
    my $buf;
    while (read $fh, $buf, 1024)
    {
        my @strings = split /\P{PosixGraph}/, $buf;
        for (@strings)
        {
            next if /^\s*$/;
            print "$_\n";
        }
    }
}
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