How to get the build.prop values?

Question

How do I get the build.prop values that are found in /system/build.prop without root access? How do I edit them?

Answer 1

Such as: SystemProperties.get("ro.rksdk.version")

Answer 2

You can probably consider using SystemProperties.get("someKey") as suggested by @kangear in your application using reflection like:

public String getSystemProperty(String key) {
    String value = null;

    try {
        value = (String) Class.forName("android.os.SystemProperties")
                .getMethod("get", String.class).invoke(null, key);
    } catch (Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }

    return value;
}

And then you can use it any where like:

getSystemProperty("someKey");

Answer 3

On the setting page of your file manager, set home as /system, then you could browse system folders and copy build.prop and paste to sdcard. I'm still trying to root my phone but I have no problem tweaking on the way (no pun).

Answer 4

Does System.getProperty() help? As an alternative, you can execute getprop in a Process and retrieve its output.

Answer 5

Try This

static String GetFromBuildProp(String PropKey) {
    Process p;
    String propvalue = "";
    try {
        p = new ProcessBuilder("/system/bin/getprop", PropKey).redirectErrorStream(true).start();
        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()));
        String line;
        while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
            propvalue = line;
        }
        p.destroy();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return propvalue;
}

Answer 6

I have checked multiple devices including some Samsung and LG devices as well as a Nexus 4, latest one was the Nvidia Shield Tablet with Android 6.0. On all devices ll on /system/build.prop gave me this result(of course with varying size and date of build.prop):

-rw-r--r-- root root 3069 2015-10-13 21:48 build.prop

This means that anyone and any app without any permissions can read the file. Root would only be required for writing the non "ro."-values. You could just create a new BufferedReader(new FileReader("/system/build.prop")) and read all lines.

Advantages of this approach:

• no need for reflection (SystemProperties.get)
• no need to spawn a Process and executing getprop

Disadvantages:

• does not contain all system properties (some values e.g. are set at boot only available at runtime)
• not handy for getting a specific value compared to SystemProperties.get