Read command output inside su process

glodos picture glodos · Aug 1, 2011 · Viewed 21.1k times · Source

firstly I will present my situation. I need to execute "su" command in my android app and it works well. Then I need to execute "ls" command and read the output. I'm doing it by getting the output stream from the "su" process and writing my command into it.

And here goes the question. How to read the output of the "ls" process? All I have is the "su" Process object. Getting the input stream from it gives nothing, because "su" doesn't write anything. But "ls" does and I don't know how to access its output messages.

I have searched many sites but I didn't find any solution. Maybe someone will help me:)

Regards

Answer

glodos picture glodos · Aug 5, 2011

Ok, I've found a solution. It should look like this:

Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(new String[]{"su", "-c", "system/bin/sh"});
DataOutputStream stdin = new DataOutputStream(p.getOutputStream());
//from here all commands are executed with su permissions
stdin.writeBytes("ls /data\n"); // \n executes the command
InputStream stdout = p.getInputStream();
byte[] buffer = new byte[BUFF_LEN];
int read;
String out = new String();
//read method will wait forever if there is nothing in the stream
//so we need to read it in another way than while((read=stdout.read(buffer))>0)
while(true){
    read = stdout.read(buffer);
    out += new String(buffer, 0, read);
    if(read<BUFF_LEN){
        //we have read everything
        break;
    }
}
//do something with the output

Hope it will be helpful for someone