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
You can use Homebrew to install fb-adb binaries:
brew install fb-adb
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 install homebrew/core/make
on earlier systems this was:
brew tap homebrew/dupes
brew install homebrew/dupes/make
and then use gmake instead of make.
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.
-
Capture a screenshot from device and write it locally to a timestamped file:
fb-adb rcmd screencap -p > screenshot-$(timestamp).png -
Dump
database.dbof thecom.bar.fooapp: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