Need one-line adb shell su push & pull to access /data from Windows batch file

Question

I wrote a Windows batch file that replaces Amazon lockscreen ads with user images on rooted kindle fire hd 7", 2013 (kfsowi). Just learned I botched the adb commands because I was running "adb insecure" so was getting su access without writing it into the adb commands.

What I need: To run in batch file, I need one-line adb shell su commands to pull from/push to /data on this device. (Or I could use adb -d shell su -c "mount -o remount rw, /data on one line followed by the pull or push)

I have fixed an ls command like this:

• this worked with adb insecure: adb ls "/data/securedStorageLocation"
• what I needed was: adb shell su -c "ls ./data/securedStorageLocation"

Now I need same for pull and push. The problem:

• With adb insecure, this works fine: adb pull "/data/securedStorageLocation" "C:/destination"
• Without adb insecure I get: remote object '/data/securedStorageLocation/' does not exist

Above happens even if I first run: adb -d shell su -c "mount -o remount rw, /data

Can someone tell me how to do the pull and push with adb shell and su?

EDIT: adb root command doesn't gain root on this device

Answer 1

Well, you have to do a few commands, as I don't believe it will work in one.

You need to do:

1. adb shell
2. su
3. cd /data/path/of/file
4. cp /data/path/of/file/copyme /data/local/tmp
5. chown shell.shell /data/local/tmp/copyme
6. exit
7. exit
8. adb pull /data/local/tmp/copyme /destination/copyme

This works for me every time.

Answer 2

adb root; adb push /local/file /distant/root/owner/file

"adb root" will restart adbd as root then your push is accepted

Answer 3

Thanks for this discussion. It led me to a solution that worked well enough for me while backing up my phone that won't mount its internal ext4, before I do something drastic while trying to fix it (apparently this needs root permissions).

Note that adb shell generally sets up a text terminal (so can convert single end-of-line characters to CRLF, mangling binary data like partition images or TAR archives). While you can work around this in Unix/Linux versions of adb (e.g. add stty raw to your shelled command) or use some newer adb with exec-out option, on Windows it still writes CRLF to its output. The neat trick is to pass data through base64 encoding and decoding (binaries are available for Windows en-masse). Also note that errors or verbose messages printed to stderr in shell end up on stdout of adb shell program in the host system - so you want to discard those after inevitable initial experimentation.

Here goes:

adb shell "su -c 'cat /dev/block/mmcblk0p25 | base64' 2>/dev/null" | base64 -d > p25

Can be easily scripted by Windows to cover all the partitions (can look the list up by ls -la /dev/block/ and/or by cat /proc/diskstats or cat /proc/partitions), e.g.:

for /L %P in (1,1,25) do ..\platform-tools\adb shell "su -c 'cat /dev/block/mmcblk0p%P | base64' 2>/dev/null" | base64 -d > s3-mmcblk0p%P.img

(Note to use %%P in CMD batch files, or %P in interactive shell).

Don't forget that there are also mmcblk0boot[01] partitions, and that the mmcblk0 overall contains all those partitions in a GPT wrapping, just like any other harddisk or impersonator of one :)

To estimate individual partition sizes, you can look at the output of:

fdisk -u -l /dev/block/mmcblk0*

Unfortunately, I did not quickly and easily manage to tar cf - mmcblkp0* and get the partition contents, so I could pipe it to e.g. 7z x -si and get the data out as multiple files in a portable one-liner as well.

To tar some files you can:

adb shell "su -c 'cd /mnt/data && tar czf - ./ | base64' 2>/dev/null" | base64 -d > s3-mmcblk0p25-userdata.tar.gz

UPDATED: Found some more tricks to transfer binary data.

Hope this helps someone else, Jim Klimov

Answer 4

Not necessarily will it be one-line, but you can try to do the following actions:

• (with adb shell, su) Copy the files to a temporary accessible location on your device (for example, /sdcard, or external SD card)
• (with adb pull) Copy these files from the temporary location to your machine
• Delete temporary copy

Possible drawback: between first and last step a malicious app, if you happen to be "using" it, may read and/or modify there files in temporary publicly accessible directory. In practice, this is very unlikely.

Answer 5

I use the batch script (extract-db-from-emulator.bat) below to pull local database out to the host:

@@echo off
SET adb_path="%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Android\sdk\platform-tools\"
SET application_id="com.example.myapp"
SET root_access_filepath="/data/user/0/%application_id%/databases/local.db"
SET pullable_filepath="/mnt/sdcard/DCIM/local.db"
SET host_directory="%USERPROFILE%\Desktop"
SET root_command="su 0 cp"
%adb_path%adb.exe shell "%root_command% %root_access_filepath% %pullable_filepath%"
%adb_path%adb.exe pull %pullable_filepath% %host_directory%

Answer 6

I see an error with

adb shell "su -c '<your command>'"

su: invalid uid/gid '-c'

The solution is on Linux

adb shell su 0 '<your command>'