Any way to run shell commands on android programma

Question

Is there any way to run terminal commands on my application and then access the data on my UI? Specifically top.

Answer 1

Okay this is what exactly worked for me just in case anyone needs it in the future... :)

Surround in try and catch

try {
    Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("top -n 1 -d 1");
    BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getInputStream()));
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

Answer 2

We, can execute commands as follow, i was succesfull in doing this....! try like this, here we need to specify the complete path of command. to get the complete path of commmand, at ur terminal (android) type

*$ which ls

/system/bin*

try {

    // Executes the command.

    Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("/system/bin/ls /sdcard");

    // Reads stdout.
    // NOTE: You can write to stdin of the command using
    //       process.getOutputStream().
    BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(
            new InputStreamReader(process.getInputStream()));
    int read;
    char[] buffer = new char[4096];
    StringBuffer output = new StringBuffer();
    while ((read = reader.read(buffer)) > 0) {
        output.append(buffer, 0, read);
    }
    reader.close();

    // Waits for the command to finish.
    process.waitFor();

    return output.toString();
} catch (IOException e) {

    throw new RuntimeException(e);

} catch (InterruptedException e) {

    throw new RuntimeException(e);
}

Answer 3

Check out Log Collector as an example. Here is the relevant file.

The key is here:

ArrayList<String> commandLine = new ArrayList<String>();
commandLine.add("logcat");//$NON-NLS-1$
[...]

Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(commandLine);
BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getInputStream()));

Answer 4

it also depends on what you are running in the terminal... if you are running "cat" on a file you can also do it like this.

final private String MEM_FILE = "/proc/meminfo";

public Long readMem() {
    String[] segs;
    FileReader fstream;
    try {
        fstream = new FileReader(MEM_FILE);
    } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
        Log.e("readMem", "Could not read " + MEM_FILE);
        return false;
    }
    BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(fstream, 500);
    String line;
    try {
        while ((line = in.readLine()) != null) {
            if (line.indexOf("MemTotal:") > 0) {
                Log.e("MemTotal", line);
                segs = line.trim().split("[ ]+");
                memTotal = Long.parseLong(segs[1]);
            }
            if (line.indexOf("MemFree:") > 0) {
                Log.e("MemFree", line);
                segs = line.trim().split("[ ]+");
                memFree = Long.parseLong(segs[1]);
            }
        }
        updateMem(); //call function to update textviews or whatever
        return true;
    } catch (IOException e) {
        Log.e("readMem", e.toString());
    }
    return false;
}

EDIT: There is a perfect example for you in the android labs project called netmeter. There is a class called Top.java that actually does exactly what you want and it is used in TaskList.java to be displayed. http://code.google.com/p/android-labs/source/browse/#svn/trunk/NetMeter/src/com/google/android/netmeter