Easy grep to detect stripped Go binaries

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 08:39:58 +0530

A couple of days ago when I was reading the guide to the Go garbage collector, I came across the following excerpt:

When all else fails, the Go GC provides a few different specific traces that provide much deeper insights into GC behavior. These traces are always printed directly to STDERR, one line per GC cycle, and are configured through the GODEBUG environment variable that all Go programs recognize.

An environment variable that all Go programs recognize, you say? I had a sneaking suspicion that I could just perform a string search for this term, given all Go programs would need to look for this environment variable definition. This way, we could guess if a binary was written in Go.

Today I Learned on lavafroth

Easy grep to detect stripped Go binaries