Help How can I capture adb commands?

[evil_haxor]

I want to log the adb commands that certain windows aplication executes. The reason is analize it to learn how it works. I tried to reverse engeenier it with no result. If someone gives me any pointers i'll be gratefull. Sorry for my bad english.

 

[scary alien]

I don't believe there's a built-in setting or flag you can set on your device to capture what adb is doing, so I would think you'd have to trap it somehow in the application that's executing it (and I'm guessing you don't have the source?).

I'm guessing you've seen the Google adb info: http://developer.android.com/tools/help/adb.html for all of the adb commands/syntax, etc.?

I can think of one way of indirectly seeing what is going on, but I'm guessing that's not what you're interested in...

 

[evil_haxor]

I can think of one way of indirectly seeing what is going on, but I'm guessing that's not what you're interested in...

Yes, I'm interested on seeing whats going on the phone while the application works its magic. I want to know what it does so I can do it manually and also learn from it. I think I'm gona try replacing the adb binary with another that captures invocations and logs every command to a file. Any thoughts on this? Thank for taking the time to anwer me.

 

[scary alien]

How about this:

In Windows:

set ADB_TRACE=1
adb devices
...​

In Linux:

export ADB_TRACE=1
adb devices
...​

This will show / display a bunch of debugging information; see the "environmental variables" section at the very end of the adb help output.

Combine this with the adb source (https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/android-4.4_r1/adb/adb.c) and you can see a lot about what's going on in the adb client.

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