iceaeterna / fb-adb

A better shell for Android devices

fb-adb is a tool for interacting with Android systems. It does much of what adb does, but with better remote shell support and, hopefully, fewer bugs. Differences between adb and fb-adb are that fb-adb:

• is binary clean (no LF -> CRLF mangling)
• transmits and updates window size
• distinguishes standard output and standard error
• properly muxes streams with independent flow control
• allows for ssh-like pty allocation control
• propagates program exit status instead of always exiting with status 0
• properly escapes program arguments
• kills remote program
• provides a generic facility to elevate to root without re-escaping

DOWNLOADS

You can use Homebrew to install fb-adb binaries:

brew install fb-adb

BUILDING

An out-of-tree build is required. You'll need a copy of the Android NDK: tell configure about it by setting the ANDROID_NDK environment variable to your NDK path or by using the --with-android-ndk argument to the configure script.

For example:

./autogen.sh
export ANDROID_NDK=/path/to/android-ndk
mkdir build
cd build
../configure
make

If building on Mac, you need gmake to build. You can use Homebrew to get it:

brew tap homebrew/dupes
brew install homebrew/dupes/make

and then use gmake instead of make.

RUNNING

The fb-adb executable itself has no dependencies other than the adb executable, which must be on PATH. Generally, you can use fb-adb just like adb; fb-adb forwards unknown commands to adb. fb-adb supports the same device-selection options that adb does.

fb-adb shell is the fancy shell command that supports the features described above. Run fb-adb shell -h for additional options.

EXAMPLES

• Capture a screenshot from device and write it locally to a timestamped file:

  fb-adb rcmd screencap -p > screenshot-$(timestamp).png

• Dump database.db of the com.bar.foo app:

  fb-adb rcmd -u com.bar.foo sqlite3 /data/data/com.bar.foo/databases/database.db .d

• Open remote shell as the user com.bar.foo:

  fb-adb shell -u com.bar.foo