Question

I’ve been attempting to use adb to pull the sms/mms inbox in its entirety from the device but am having some trouble. The phone is rooted and I’ve tried the following commands:

Input

./adb pull /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db

output

Permission denied

Input

./adb pull su /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db

Output

The help menu

Am I flawed in my thinking that I can pull the sms inbox via commands similar to the ones I’ve tried? If it can be done what is wrong with my command?

Thanks

Answer 1

One way to fetch contents of the /data directory is to first copy the sqlite db to somewhere that is accessible, and then using adb pull to copy from there to the host.

For example, the following commands use the android bridge to grab the sms data (assuming it is contained in /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db):

adb shell
$ mkdir /mnt/sdcard/tmp
# su
# cat /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db > /mnt/sdcard/tmp/mmssms.db
# exit
$ exit
adb pull /mnt/sdcard/tmp/mmssms.db .

Now you have the mms/sms database on your host machine, probe to find most popular recipient, for example:

sqlite3 -header mmssms.db 'select address from sms' | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -n

Finally, tidy up the temp area:

adb shell
$ rm /mnt/sdcard/tmp/mmssms.db
$ rmdir /mnt/sdcard/tmp
$ exit