It can be useful to write and store scripts on a local development machine and run them remotely on one or more Android devices. This post covers how this is done.

Software Versions

$ date -u "+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S +0000"
2016-04-13 23:01:12 +0000
$ uname -vm
Darwin Kernel Version 15.4.0: Fri Feb 26 22:08:05 PST 2016; root:xnu-3248.40.184~3/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
$ ex -s +'%s/<[^>].\{-}>//ge' +'%s/\s\+//e' +'%norm J' +'g/^$/d' +%p +q! /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist | grep -E 'ProductName|ProductVersion' | sed 's/^[^ ]* //g' | sed 'N; s/\n/ /g'
Mac OS X 10.11.4
/*
$ adb shell "uname -a" # Nexus 5; Cyanogenmod CM-13.0-20160413-NIGHTLY; Android 6.0.1
Linux localhost 3.4.0-g9b167b4 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Apr 13 01:02:03 PDT 2016 armv7l

Instructions

Create a sample script to execute. The shebang line is written for Android.

script.sh

#!/system/bin/env sh
echo "$(whoami)@$(hostname)"
uname -a
which env
which sh

Executing commands over ssh is relatively easy, however most Android devices do not have sshd enabled.

ssh username@host < script.sh

A script can not be piped into adb. The following strategy can be used instead. This will probably only work for sh scripts. The shebang is ignored.

adb shell "$(cat script.sh)"

If the shebang is important, a script like the following can be used to execute other scripts remotely.

adb-remote-script.sh

#!/usr/bin/env sh
for script
do
  SHEBANG=$(head -n 1 "${script}")
  case $SHEBANG in
    '#!'*)
      adb shell "echo '$(cat "${script}")' | ${SHEBANG#'#!'}"
      ;;  
    *)  
      adb shell "$(cat "${script}")"
      ;;  
  esac
done

The remote execution script can be used as followed.

chmod +x adb-remote-script.sh
./adb-remote-script.sh script.sh

The above is a proof of concept. Interpreters like perl and python are probably not installed. If piping input into the shebang does not work, another case can be written. For example, the following could be used if elixir were available. This case needs to be placed above the other case statements.

    '#!'*elixir*)
      adb shell "${SHEBANG#'#!'} -e '$(cat "${script}")'"
      ;;

References: