Does "strings" against a binary list all usable variables?

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I've had a request from a vendor to set a specific environment variable against their software. I'm currently awaiting an explanation of what this actually does. However, I decided to check to see exactly what environment variables were available within the binary using "strings" (on Solaris in this case). It doesn't list the one that they're talking about though.

I think this means that the setting they're asking for isn't actually picked up in any way by the binary mentioned (or any of that vendor's binaries - I checked through the lot of them). However, I'm unsure and can't find an answer to whether running "strings" against a compiled binary will list all of the variables that it can pick up and use from the OS.

Can anyone help to confirm this?

Thanks in advance.

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nobody On BEST ANSWER

The fact that the variable name does not appear as a readable string in the binary does not guarantee that the program does not get its value. The environment variable name may, for example, be constructed at runtime by concatenating substrings.