Program code stores literal values (constants) numbers and strings in the code.

Instead of searching through the assembler code, we can use the strings utility to try to print all "strings" it can find in the executable file. Applying strings to the example executable file main:

$ strings main  
     

the output is

/lib/ld-linux.so.2
__gmon_start__
libc.so.6
_IO_stdin_used
printf
__libc_start_main
GLIBC_2.0
PTRh
[^_]
Sum of the first 10 integers is %d
     

You get a fair amount of gibberish, but you can also find literal strings that the program has created and used that might be rather tedious to find otherwise and could be helpful for you in detecting the behavior of an unknown executable.