Introduction
Android Terminal Emulator allows command line access to your Android device.
You can appreciate that this provides a familiar Linux environment, and an opportunity to
poke around the darker recesses of your Android devices. It is however subjected to the
same security sandbox as all other Android applications, so you are not about to
be able to execute su if your device is a regular consumer Android.
Android Terminal Emulator is especially valuable for people who own consumer devices from
manufacturers who put a broken version of Terminal Emulator in their ROM. The broken
version generates an irritating force close due to Exception Ljava/lang/UnsatisfiedLinkError; thrown
while initializing Lcom/android/term/Exec;.
Compiling The Android Terminal Emulator From Source
One good reason to compile your own Android Terminal Emulator from source is to add permissions to run certain programs.
An example is logcat. This command requires the permission
android.permission.READ_LOGS. By adding this
permission to AndroidManifest.xml, you can execute logcat
from Android Terminal Emulator.
The source code for Android Terminal Emulator can be downloaded from https://github.com/jackpal/Android-Terminal-Emulator.
With the added permission, logcat now displays the system log. You can return to the command prompt
with ^C (press Volume Down followed by C).
