Have aliases in adb shell non-interactive mode

Question

Hi I need to run things in the form of adb shell <command>

When I test everything out inside adb shell, it works because I was able to set some aliases in .bashrc. However, when I do adb shell <command>, nothing works because .bashrc is not used when you run adb shell <command>, because it's in the non-interactive mode.

How can I work around this? Can I adb push some files to the filesystem so that the alias will be there when adb shell is run?

Why not just do the alias substitution in whatever is generating the commands? — Chris Stratton, Oct 09 '14 at 21:53

score 16 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 10 '14 at 01:27

16

If your android device is rooted you can add your aliases for adb shell into the /system/etc/mkshrc file.

answered Oct 10 '14 at 01:27

Alex P.

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If you get a "Read-only file system" error, boot into TWRP or whatever custom recovery, mount system, then edit the file. – Paul J Dec 29 '15 at 22:09
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A got that read-only error, but booting into TWRP didn't work for me, because /system didn't have the `etc/mkshrc` file as when booted normally. I used `mount -o remount,rw /system` without booting into TWRP to mount `/system` read-write. – Johannes Bittner Feb 20 '17 at 16:44
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@JohannesBittner ... to complement your excellent comment: To remount read-only again (for security reasons) use this command in a terminal as root (su): `mount -o remount,ro /system` – R Yoda Jan 06 '18 at 13:42
@R Yoda. Nowadays since android 9, use `/` instead of `/system`. `mount -o,rw $(mount | grep /dev/root | awk '{print $3}'` does the job for any android version. – 5p0ng3b0b Feb 13 '20 at 15:04
oops missed closing bracket etc. `mount -o rw,remount $(mount | grep /dev/root | awk '{print $3}')` – 5p0ng3b0b Feb 13 '20 at 15:11
Adding alias to `/system/etc/mkshrc` only works after getting the `adb shell` prompt. It does *not* work if the alias is invoked using `adb shell ""`. (I have a rooted Android-10 based device). – Tzunghsing David Wong Jan 21 '23 at 16:46

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 03 '18 at 21:41

One way to do this is to issue several shell commands in a single ADB command. You can put them in a string, and separate them with semicolons, thus:

adb shell "alias foo bar ; export MY_VARIABLE=/path/to/somewhere ; my_executable "

The " are crucial here, make sure they are paired up correctly. You could run your .bashrc this way, thus:

adb shell "source /path/to/.bashrc ; my_executable"

score -3 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 18 '14 at 15:35

-3

You can write a bash script that sets the aliases and then executes your shell:

#!/usr/bin/bash
. $HOME/.bashrc
adb shell $@

answered Oct 18 '14 at 15:35

Bruce Barnett

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This will not work as written. The shell on Android is not bash, and is not in /usr/bin. – John Dallman Jan 24 '19 at 22:07

Have aliases in adb shell non-interactive mode

3 Answers3