Practical Mobile Forensics - Fourth Edition

Accessing the adb shell

The ADB shell command allows you to access the shell on an Android device and interact with the device.

The following is the command to access the adb shell and execute a basic ls command to see the contents of the current directory:

C:\android-sdk\platform-tools>adb.exe shell shell@android:/ $ ls
ls acct cache
config d
data default.prop dev
efs etc
factory fstab.smdk4x12 init
init.bt.rc init.goldfish.rc init.rc init.smdk4x12.rc init.smdk4x12.usb.rc
....  

The Android emulator can be used by you to execute and understand adb commands before using them on the device. In Chapter 9, Android Data Extraction Techniques, we will explain more about leveraging adb to install applications, copy files and folders from the device, ...