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When starting an Android emulator (SDK 24.4.1) on linux by command line you should be able to get a root shell by using the -shell command line option. At least that's what the manual says

https://developer.android.com/studio/run/emulator-commandline.html (Create a root shell console on the current terminal. You can use this command even if the adb daemon in the emulated system is broken. Pressing Ctrl-c from the shell stops the emulator instead of the shell)

But when starting the emulator like

emulator -netdelay none -netspeed full -avd nougat-x86_64 -gpu off -no-window -shell

I do see the shell output of the Android emulator booting, but I can not send any commands to it, i.e. ls.

Also opening a tcp port for the shell and communicating via telnet shows the same behavior.

emulator -netdelay none -netspeed full -avd nougat-x86_64 -gpu off -no-window -shell-serial tcp::4444,server,nowait

telnet localhost 4444

There's not much information about this topic on the internet, but perhaps someone already dealt with this topic. Thanks in advance!

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  • What's your question? – Dan Hulme Nov 3 '16 at 17:17
  • I want to get a root shell, since my adbd crashes. But the -shell option does not work. Meanwhile I found out, that you can get a shell by using -show-kernel. But I would like to communicate with the root shell by tcp. There's also an open issue at google: code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=202760 – Marvin S. Nov 4 '16 at 16:14
  • This seems to have also been the topic at stackoverflow.com/questions/39374975/… – Marvin S. Nov 4 '16 at 16:16
  • Use adb shell of course. If I recall an emulator would typically give you that shell as root by default. If not, for a configuration which supports offering a root shell, do adb root first (rather obviously, that is not something that works on a consumer device configured in the way that Android was designed for consumer devices to be configured) – Chris Stratton Mar 18 '19 at 16:26
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From android source, line 698:

seems the '-shell' option is as same as '-logcat' option, thus I think the documentation is not described well and of course the '-shell' option won't bring you an interactive root shell from the virtual serial.

Maybe I'm wrong, I only tested this on MacOS.

With further test, as same as this guy's post, the '-show-kernel' will actually get you the kernel log and an interactive rootable console.

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