In Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 and Unix-like

Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

 operating systems, the strip program removes unnecessary information from executable binary programs and object files, thus potentially resulting in better performance and sometimes significantly less disk space usage. This information may consist of debugging and symbol information; however the standard leaves the scope of changes up to the implementer.

The GNU Project

GNU Project

The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on September 27, 1983, by Richard Stallman at MIT. It initiated GNU operating system development in January, 1984...

 ships an implementation of strip as part of the GNU Binutils package.
strip has been ported to other operating systems including Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

.

See also

• Executable compression
  Executable compression
  Executable compression is any means of compressing an executable file and combining the compressed data with decompression code into a single executable. When this compressed executable is executed, the decompression code recreates the original code from the compressed code before executing it...
  
  
• List of Unix programs
• strings
  Strings (Unix)
  In computer software, strings is a program in Unix-like operating systems that finds and prints text strings embedded in binary files such as executables.It can be used on object files, and core dumps....
  
  
• Debug symbol
  Debug symbol
  A debug symbol is information that expresses which programming-language constructs generated a specific piece of machine code in a given executable module. Sometimes the symbolic information is compiled together with the module's binary file, or distributed in separate file, or simply discarded...
  
  
• Symbol table
  Symbol table
  In computer science, a symbol table is a data structure used by a language translator such as a compiler or interpreter, where each identifier in a program's source code is associated with information relating to its declaration or appearance in the source, such as its type, scope level and...