Useful Android Bash Commands

Preface#

I thought I'd share with you some everyday Bash commands that help with Android development.

alias atop="adb shell dumpsys activity top"
 
capture() {
  adb shell screencap -p | perl -pe 's/\x0D\x0A/\x0A/g' > ./$1.png
}
alias capture=capture
 
setLocale() {
  adb shell "su -c 'setprop persist.sys.language $1; setprop persist.sys.country $2; stop; sleep 5; start'"
}
alias setLocale=setLocale

I put these into my .bash_profile file so that they can be used whenever. Don't forget to run source ~/.bash_profile to update your terminal.

atop#

This command will have adb output a bunch of debug information about the current Activity on the phone. It's great to get a quick sense of your View hierarchy. It also shows which fragments are being used and some state information.

capture#

I'm no Perl wizard, I actually found this command here. Running capture my_picture will output my_picture.png to the current directory. Very helpful for taking screenshots and not having to transfer them from the device.

setLocale#

You will need root access to run this command, but don't worry because Genymotion devices are rooted by default. This is a quick way to change the langauge AND country of a device. See Android's Locale class for more information on that.