How can I get information from the shell about commands available in Android shell?

Question

Can't find information on how to print out documentation on android shell commands while in the shell. Something along the lines of

help ls

Answer 1

Try this:

ls --help

Answer 2

The command help got stripped for most (if not all) commandline tools.

The only thing I can tell you is how to find out about the functionality of all the tools or better where you can find the sources and look at each of their code.

Here you can find the commandline tools used in Android. Git source browser: system/core/toolbox

Now looking at the code of the ls command I can tell you for example that it supports following switches.

• -l long list
• -s list sizes
• -R list recursively
• -d list directories
• -a list all

You can try to find that information in the source code of the commands you need.

Hope it helped.

Answer 3

The short answer is: you can't and you shouldn't need to.

Android's shell environment is purposefully very limited - it's pretty much just there to support the odd script needed for system events such as booting. If you're trying to use them in your app, you're probably doing something you shouldn't be doing. If nothing else, I strongly suspect the Android team would not consider the shell tools to be part of any published API, so would feel free to change them, including adding and removing behaviour, at any time. Also, I don't think there's much you can do with 'ls' which you can't do with Java's file handling APIs...

Answer 4

My reputation isn't high enough to respond to Julian's comment directly, but if the goal is to find where the application database is, it should be in /data/data/com.app.package.name/databases