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22

Just for reference of others, here is some background on the .ab file format. The Android Backup (*.ab) file is a compressed TAR file. It is compressed using the DEFLATE algorithm. On top of that, there can be AES encryption used. This is determined when you create the backup, if you enter a password then the backup is encrypted, otherwise; there is no ...


19

If I'm understanding your question correctly, you're asking how to get root access automatically when you run adb shell, so that you don't have to go into the shell and type su to execute a command as root on your phone. This is controlled by a flag in your boot partition, which most custom ROMs have modified to allow root permission by default. If you get ...


16

The su binary needs both the execution and the setuid permission bit set. The first is needed that the file can be executed and the second is that it automatically runs with the file owner's rights (set user id, or setuid. In this case the owner is root. Read more here). Files on the external storage don't have the executable and setuid permission bits set ...


13

Where an app is stored very much depends on several criteria: System apps / pre-installed-bloatware-apps are stored in /system/app (which is mounted read-only to prevent any changes) normal apps in internal memory go to /data/app some apps (encrypted on internal storage?) go to /data/app-private Apps stored on external memory go to an encrypted container ...


13

More specifically adb push [file] [path] will take [file] from the PC and copy it to [path] on the android device. adb install [apkfile] will copy [apkfile] from the pc into /data/app/ on the android device. The main difference being that push will let you specify where you want the file to go on the device, and install puts it in a known location ...


9

In adb shell or terminal emulator (and most likely over SSH) you can use the pm utility to install apps. The command is: pm install /sdcard/app1.apk The following are the switches of pm: usage: pm [list|path|install|uninstall] pm list packages [-f] [-d] [-e] [-u] [FILTER] pm list permission-groups pm list permissions [-g] [-f] ...


8

I found sort of a workaround for this (at least for a rooted phone). If a phone is rooted, busybox is most probably installed. stty is part of busybox. stty intr ^x Redefines Ctrl+X to act as a break command, e.g. what was previously Ctrl+C.


7

Yes and no. As far as I'm aware, a typical Android install will not contain unzip. You can, however, install busybox for Android, which provides the unzip utility. Then a simple: adb shell unzip /sdcard/archive.zip Would do the trick. If you're rooted you can use a busybox installer from the Market like Stericson's. If you're not rooted then you should be ...


7

Yes, you actually can do this. It's kind of kludgy looking when you inspect the clipboard, but it works just fine. First off, you can inspect the current clipboard contents with service call clipboard 1 from an adb shell (or, without shelling in first, adb shell service call clipboard 1). It may start out initially blank after a reboot, for example: # ...


7

ADB commands work without root. However the /data partition is only accessible by rooted users* and while /system can be read by anyone, it's a read-only partition and root is needed to remount it as writable. *There's one exception. The/data/local folder is accessible by non-root users too. This folder is primarily used for temporary like when you install ...


6

At least on my phone, it seems you need way more available space thanthe size of the app you are actually trying to upgrade. In my case it seems I needed to have at least ~13MB free space to upgrade anything at all (even for 500KB apps). Some tips to free space: Go to Settings, Applications, Manage Applications, click "Move to SD card" on the ones that ...


6

Launch the emulator from the command line so that you can specify a /system partition size using the -partition-size <MB> option. For example, I use this to launch an emulator running Android 1.6 with a /system partition of 512 MB: emulator -avd Donut -partition-size 512 ...where "Donut" is whatever you named your AVD (you can check in Eclipse's AVD ...


6

droidVNC Server allows you to view your Android device's screen live on the computer through USB with ADB or over Wifi. You will also need a VNC client on your PC. You can see a video of this in action on the developer's website. This is for rooted devices only. It's my understanding that you need to have a rooted device to get this type of interaction ...


6

I don't think that this is possible. See Matthew's Post But let's have a lock on how Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory() returns the external storage directory. A quick look in android/os/Environment.java shows that all this method does, is returning a static constant File member called EXTERNAL_STORAGE_DIRECTORY. This constant is initialized by ...


6

I had the same problem with Kindle Fire Utility, and I actually figured this out. The install_drivers.bat replaces the driver, which is not what you want! You need both drivers in place, the regular Amazon Kindle one, and the ADB driver. To get it to work: Uninstall the Android ADB driver in Device Manager (right click to do this) In Device Manager, right ...


6

The easiest way, without using any specialised tools is just to visit that app's page in the Android Market. All apps in the Market have their package name as part of their URL, so you can just take your package name and prefix it with https://market.android.com/details?id= to get https://market.android.com/details?id=com.letang.game103.en Which will take ...


6

Sockets and pipes represent Unix' way of inter process communication, and a communication channel has no point in having a size. Sockets are thus not seekable as in go to position x in the file. Linux (which Android makes use of) has 7 file types: Regular Files Directories Character  Device Files Block Device Files Local Domain Sockets Named Pipes ...


6

There are perfectly good reasons why those informations are readable, and that's nothing dangerous (writing, however, would be). This is inherited from the Linux system Android builds upon -- and I will give you a few short examples to show you the good of it: If you list contents of the /proc (virtual) directory, you will find things like e.g.: ...


6

ADB is the acronym for Android Debug Bridge, which is part of the Android SDK (Software Development Kit). It uses a client-server-model (i.e. adbd, the ADB daemon, is running on the device and can be connected to), and in most cases is used via an USB connection. It is also possible to use it via WiFi (wireless adb). There's nothing you need to install on ...


5

Try adding adb's folder (platform-tools) to your PATH. The adb executable used to be in the tools folder on versions of the SDK up to v8 IIRC, but it was moved in v9, so ddms.bat is probably looking for it in the wrong spot. See also this thread on StackOverflow (accepted answer there courtesy one of our mods here) to see if this is in fact the issue. ...


5

Personally, I use ADBWireless with my G1 on CM5 because I had problems with the USB driver working correctly between my computer and my G1. However, I had problems with this app in CM4 (to test against Android 1.6) on my G1. I was able to get it to work on CM4 with Remote ADB. Note, however, that these connect to the device via ADB via wifi, not Bluetooth. ...


5

There's QtADB which uses adb. You can also install an SSH or ftp server on the phone and then use Nautilus with ssh://ip-or-name-of-your-phone/ or ftp://ip-or-name-of-your-phone/ URLs (you can create bookmarks in Nautilus). The cool thing about a standard SSH or ftp server on your phone is that you don't have to install anything special on the computer. I ...


5

This is really ugly, but you can read them from the command line by using sqlite3 to view the database entries. You'll probably need to dig up a binary for this unless you have a custom ROM installed. There are some instructions for installing said binary in this Stack Overflow question, and SuperOneClick comes packaged with it (a copy of the binary itself ...


5

The find command works well in adb shell. The syntax is find /path -name file_name. For searching read only areas you will need root. If the find command is not available on your particular device, you might need to install BusyBox (search the Market.) For example, adb shell find / -name *maps* will find all files that contain word "maps" across the entire ...


5

I went to https://www.google.com/dashboard/b/0/ and found the section labeled "Android device"; that had a link labeled "More data stored about this device". Clicking that opened a popup window that showed a disappointingly short list of apps that had backed up some of their data: just some of the built-in apps from Google.


5

The file is not encrypted, unless your specify so when creating the backup. It is however compressed (using deflate). You can find out the exact format by looking at Android source (com/android/server/BackupManagerService.java) code, and, technically, should be able to extract specific data from it. However, IIRC, there are some file integrity checks in ...


5

Yes and no. You can issue intents with adb but that's it. So the steps you described can't be achieved with adb. Edit: ce4 showed a blog post which mentions the input binary which is able to simulate key events. adb shell input keyevent <keycode>


4

Yes. On your second PC, set the environment variable ADBHOST to the IP address of the first PC and run the adb server and client. Related steps (more detailed) are here. Although you're not connecting to a physical device, it is apparently also possible to do so over the network without using USB. Instructions for that are here.


4

If you install Eclipse with the Android SDK there is a perspective called DDMS that includes a file explorer. You can easily copy files from/to the device with this tool, which uses adb push/pull in background. Another way is to simply unmount the SD card from the phone and use it as a mass storage. But in this mode you can access only the SD card and the ...



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