Rating:

**Very simple reversing challenge.**

![](https://vasic.dev/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Screenshot_30.png)

Here, we have the meow.exe file. Since this challenge is worth ~50 points, we can assume it's easy one. Regarding this, we shouldn't use any disassemblers, debuggers, reverse engineering frameworks, and other relevant tools. We will do what the title suggests. Cats At Play.

The strings command in Linux is a utility that allows you to extract human-readable strings from binary files. It scans a binary file for sequences of printable characters and displays them as output, making it useful for examining files that may contain text strings, such as executable files, libraries, and other binary files.

`strings meow.exe | grep -E '^RS'`

![](https://vasic.dev/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Screenshot_31.png)

The command is a combination of two Linux commands, strings and grep, used in conjunction to analyze the contents of a binary file named meow.exe. Here's a breakdown of what each part of the command does:

* The **strings** command is used to extract human-readable strings from the binary file "meow.exe". It scans the file for sequences of printable characters and displays them as output. This can include text strings, ASCII art, and other readable content embedded in the binary file.
* The **pipe (|)** symbol is used to redirect the output of the preceding command to the input of the following command. This allows the output of strings to be filtered by the grep command based on a specific pattern.
* The **grep** command is used to search for lines in the input that match a given pattern. In this case, the pattern being searched for is ^RS, which specifies lines that start with the characters "RS". The -E option is used to enable extended regular expressions, allowing for more complex patterns to be used.

**Flag: *RS{C4tsL1keStr1ng5}***

Original writeup (https://vasic.dev/blog/ritsec-ctf/#Cats_At_Play).