How to copy selected files from Android with adb pull

37
votes

I'm attempting to use the adb pull command to copy only certain files (jpg) to my macbook. I tried "adb pull sdcard/mydir/*.jpg" but it apparently doesn't interpret wildcards. How can I get only the jpg files copied over? I have rooted the phone if that helps.

3
androidadb

3 Answers

72
votes

You can move your files to other folder and then pull whole folder.

adb shell mkdir /sdcard/tmp
adb shell mv /sdcard/mydir/*.jpg /sdcard/tmp # move your jpegs to temporary dir
adb pull /sdcard/tmp/ # pull this directory (be sure to put '/' in the end)
adb shell mv /sdcard/tmp/* /sdcard/mydir/ # move them back
adb shell rmdir /sdcard/tmp # remove temporary directory
15
votes

Pull multiple files using regex:

Create pullFiles.sh:

#!/bin/bash
HOST_DIR=<pull-to>
DEVICE_DIR=/sdcard/<pull-from>
EXTENSION=".jpg"

for file in $(adb shell ls $DEVICE_DIR | grep $EXTENSION'$')
do
    file=$(echo -e $file | tr -d "\r\n"); # EOL fix
    adb pull $DEVICE_DIR/$file $HOST_DIR/$file;
done

Run it:

Make it executable: chmod +x pullFiles.sh

Run it: ./pullFiles.sh

Notes:

  • as is, won't work when filenames have spaces
  • includes a fix for end-of-line (EOL) on Android, which is a "\r\n"
0
votes

As to the short script, the following runs on my Linux host

#!/bin/bash
HOST_DIR=<pull-to>
DEVICE_DIR=/sdcard/<pull-from>
EXTENSION="\.jpg"

while read MYFILE ; do
    adb pull "$DEVICE_DIR/$MYFILE" "$HOST_DIR/$MYFILE"
done < $(adb shell ls -1 "$DEVICE_DIR" | grep "$EXTENSION")

"ls minus one" lets "ls" show one file per line, and the quotation marks allow spaces in the filename.