ADB – Easy Tutorial

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ADB this, ADB that, ADB to get such and such… If you are new to the world of Android, you are probably asking yourself “what in the world are these people talking about?” ADB or Android Debug Bridge is basically an interface or communication medium for the user to connect and issue commands to an Android device or emulator. It is a client – server type program that many devs have used to do all the wonderful things that can be done with the little green guy. Anything from sending or pushing files to the device, exploring the directory, and even root processes for most devices are based on certain ADB actions. Many users getting into Android are just getting their feet wet with the commands, but since the information on xda-developers is so vast and scattered, we decided to make a small guide, which will show beginners some of the basic commands and what they can do with them.

For starters, one needs a computer with an OS of their choice (Windows (most versions), Mac OSX, or Linux (several distros are capable of using this)), all the necessary Android drivers, and Android SDK, which can be freely downloaded from the Android Developers website. Alternatively, the thread linked at the end of the article also has direct links for all the required downloads.

After you are done with all the downloads, you have to follow the instructions found in here in order to install and run the SDK successfully. The instructions may seem long, but the whole process is a lot quicker if everything is done correctly.

Once you have everything installed and ready to go, you may want to move the contents of the ADB drivers and the SDK to the root of your drive for ease of access. To do this simply grab the folder with the drivers and drop it in the root of your hard drive. You do this because now you have to connect your device to the computer and it will ask you for the drivers, which now are conveniently located. Do this and wait until your computer has finished recognizing the device.

Since everything seems ready, you have to open command prompt and go to the folder that contains ADB, which is normally

C:\android-sdk-windows-1.1_r1\tools> <run your adb command here>

This should be the path as it belongs to the folder that you moved earlier to C:\. If you have a different path, modify it accordingly. Now, all the commands will look something like this:

adb <insert your command here>

That is pretty much it. For instance, if you wanted to push a file into your device, your command would be something like this:

adb push something.txt /sdcard/something.txt

This command basically tells adb to copy a file named “something.txt” to the root of your sdcard. If you are interested in finding out more commands for this, you can find them here, where you will find more in depth instructions on how to use other features as well.

Again, this was only a small introductory guide to ADB, and it was inspired by a more complete guide created by XDA member VanillaTbone. If you have questions, there are tons of information available throughout XDA as well as on Google.

You can find more information in this guide thread.

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