gryf/mc_adbfs

Access your Android device filesystem from Midnight Commander through adb

Midnight Commander adbfs external fs plugin

This is Midnight Commander extfs plugin for browsing Android device through adb interface written in Python.

Rquirements

• Python 3.x (tested on 3.5.4, 3.6 and 3.7)
• adb installed and in $PATH or provided via the config file
• An Android device or emulator preferably rooted
• busybox (toolbox, toybox) installed and available in the path on the device

Make sure, that issuing from command line:

$ adb shell busybox ls
$ # or in case of no PATH adb placement
$ /path/to/adb shell busybox ls

it should display files from root directory on the device.

Features

• Listing the directory with (default), or without skipping system dirs (acct, dev, proc, etc)
• Copying files from and to the device
• Creating directories
• Removing files and directories
• Symbolic links in lists are corrected to be relative to the file system
• Symbolic links also point to the right target, skipping intermediate links

Installation

Copy adbfs into ~/.local/share/mc/extfs.d/ directory and make it executable if needed.

Usage

To use it, just issue:

$ cd adbfs://

under MC - after some time you should see the files and directories on your device. For convenience you can add a bookmark (accessible under CTRL+\) for fast access. The time is depended on how many files and directories you have on your device and how fast it is :)

Configuration

You can configure behaviour of this plugin using .ini file located under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mc/adbfs.ini (which usually is located under ~/.config/mc/adbfs.ini), and have default values, like:

[adbfs]
debug = false
dirs_to_skip = ["acct", "charger", "d", "dev", "proc", "sys"]
suppress_colors = false
root =
adb_command = adb
adb_connect =
try_su = false

where:

• debug will provide a little bit more verbose information, useful for debugging
• dirs_to_skip list of paths to directories which will be skipped during reading. If leaved empty, or setted to empty list ([]) will read everything (slow!)
• suppress_colors this option will make busybox not to display colors, helpful, if busybox ls is configured to display colors by default. Does not affect toolbox or toybox.
• root root directory to read. Everything outside of that directory will be omitted. That would be the fastest way to access certain location on the device. Note, that dirs_to_skip still apply inside this directory.
• adb_command absolute or relative path to adb command. ~/ or environment variables are allowed.
• adb_connect specifies if connection to specific device needs to be performed before accessing shell. It is useful for adb over network feature. Typical value here is a device IP address with optional port, which defaults to 5555.
• try_su specifies whether or not to try to detect if su command is available and usable.

Contribution

There is a Makefile in the top directory, which is basic helper for running the tests. Please use it, and adapt/add tests for provided fixes/functionality. The reason why tox wasn't used is, that there is no setup.py file, and it's difficult to install simple script, which isn't a python module (python interpreter will refuse to import module without .py extension).

It requires GNU make program, and also virtualenv. Using it is simple as running following command:

$ make

it will run py3 and flake8 jobs to check it against the code. For running tests against Python 3:

$ make py3

or flake 8:

$ make flake8

Exit status on any of those means that test fail. Appropriate message/traceback will also be visible.

Limitations

• Initial listing might be slow. Depending on how fast the device is, how many files are on the device and so on
• Some filenames might be still inaccessible for operating
• All files operations which needs root privileges will fail (for now)
• The implementation is experimental and it's by now working with mine device; while it might not work with yours

License

This software is licensed under 3-clause BSD license. See LICENSE file for details.

mc_adbfs's Issues

Non-recursive listing

Is it possible to make the initial listing non recursive,
and then just read directory content by opening it?

ls --color=never

Please add --color=never param to ls,
otherwise file names contain color codes:

.[1;34m..[0m
.[1;34m...[0m
.[1;34macct.[0m
.[1;34mcache.[0m
.[1;34mdata.[0m
.[1;34mdev.[0m
.[1;34mmnt.[0m
.[1;34mproc.[0m

etc

python3?

Any chance that python3 will be supported?