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.