How do I run an adb shell command?

Switch on developer options and USB debugging on the phone, plug it in, then run adb shell from a machine with platform-tools installed — or run adb shell on its own to get an interactive prompt and type the command without the prefix. If the command produces binary output, such as a screenshot, use adb exec-out instead of adb shell: the plain shell service attaches a terminal, which rewrites newline bytes and corrupts the data.

Do adb shell commands need root?

Not the ones on this reference. They run as the shell user, which can manage packages for its own Android user, read most dumpsys services, write the settings provider, inject input and read shared storage. Root is only needed for things this reference deliberately avoids — reading another app's private data (except through run-as on a debuggable build), writing system partitions, or reading /data/anr directly.

Why does the output look different on my phone?

Either the Android version or the manufacturer. Some flags and fields arrived in a specific release, and those are noted per command. The rest is OEM patching, which hits dumpsys hardest: a dump is debug output whose text is whatever the service author last printed, and manufacturers change it and backport their changes. Read fields by name rather than by position, and treat an unfamiliar shape as a difference rather than as a failure.

Can I run this from a browser instead of a terminal?

For many commands, yes — the Web ADB tools on this site talk to a phone over WebUSB from a Chromium-based desktop browser, with no SDK installed and nothing uploaded. Each page links to the tool that runs its command, when one exists. Two limits are worth knowing: only one program can hold the ADB interface at a time, so a desktop adb server has to be stopped first, and adb forward and adb reverse cannot work in a browser at all.

dumpsys sensorservice

read-only

Every sensor the phone has, with its vendor, type, rates and batching — plus a buffer of recent readings.

Command: adb shell dumpsys sensorservice
Commands: System services (dumpsys)
Risk: read-only

Syntax

dumpsys sensorservice

Examples

```
dumpsys sensorservice
```
The sensor table and the last readings per sensor.
```
getevent -lp
```
The other half of the input picture: raw evdev devices, including the touchscreen.

Reading the output

Sample output

Sensor List:
0x00000001) LSM6DSO Accelerometer | STMicro | ver: 1 | type: android.sensor.accelerometer(1) | perm: n/a | flags: 0x00000000
	continuous | minRate=12.50Hz | maxRate=416.00Hz | FIFO (max,reserved) = (3000, 600) events | non-wakeUp
Accelerometer: last 50 events
	 1 (ts=12345.678901234, wall=13:37:01.234) 0.12, 9.81, 0.03,

Each sensor is a hex handle, a close paren, then pipe-separated fields, followed by a tab-indented line of rates and batching. Further down, the recent-event buffers are keyed by the sensor's *name* — not its handle — and are printed newest first. Field order is not stable across versions or manufacturers, so read by label.

Output fields

Field	Meaning
0x…)	The sensor handle. The one token every version prints.
type: android.sensor.x(N)	The platform type string and its numeric value.
minRate / maxRate	Hertz — and the naming is inverted from what it looks like: minRate comes from the maximum delay and maxRate from the minimum delay.
FIFO (max,reserved)	Batching capacity in events. `no batching` appears instead when there is none.
wakeUp / non-wakeUp	Whether the sensor can wake the phone from suspend.
ts=	Seconds on the boot-time clock, which a suspend can make non-monotonic in the buffer.
[value masked]	The caller lacks the permission that sensor needs; the reading is withheld, not missing.

What access it needs

`SensorService` is native, so its check is not the usual Java one: `SensorService::dump` asks `PermissionCache::checkCallingPermission` for `android.permission.DUMP`, which the Shell package holds, and on failure appends a denial line in place of the listing. No root is needed to see the sensor table. There is a second, quieter gate above that, and it is the one that will confuse you. Inside the same function `privileged` is computed as `getCallingUid() == 0` — root, and nothing else. An `adb shell` runs as uid 2000, so it is never privileged, and every sensor whose `getRequiredPermission()` is non-empty has its recent-event buffer switched to the masked format. Nothing is refused and no warning is printed: the timestamps still appear, and where the numbers should be you get `[value masked]`. That is not a missing reading, a sleeping sensor or a broken driver, and re-running will not change it. It is the only thing on this page that `adb root` would alter, and on a user build `adb root` is refused, so on a retail phone the masked sensors stay masked. The sensor table itself — handles, vendors, rates, batching — is never masked, which is why the Android Sensor Tester can build its list from a plain shell.

Failure messages, decoded

Message	Meaning
Permission Denial: can't dump SensorService from pid=4821, uid=10231	Native code, so this one does not have the doubled `from from` of the Java dumps and does not name the missing permission — match it as its own string. It is appended to the result buffer and therefore arrives on stdout in place of the sensor list, which is why it reads at a glance like a phone with no sensors.
No Sensors on the device	Printed when the service holds no sensors at all, immediately followed by a `devInitCheck : <n>` line carrying the sensor device's own init status. A negative value there is an errno from a hardware layer that never came up — a very different problem from an emulator image that genuinely ships no sensors, and the only way to tell the two apart from this dump.
Can't find service: sensorservice	Printed to stderr by the `dumpsys` binary before the service was ever contacted: the service manager has no `sensorservice` entry. Normal during boot. Because it goes to stderr, a run captured without `2>&1` shows an empty listing with no explanation in it anywhere.
* SERVICE 'sensorservice' DUMP TIMEOUT (10000ms) EXPIRED *	Ten seconds is the `dumpsys` default and this dump holds the service's connection lock while it walks every sensor and every recent-event buffer. What survives is the head of the output — the sensor table — and what is lost is the tail, which is the recent events. A truncated dump is still a usable inventory and is not a usable sample of readings.

Version and vendor notes

The text dump has printed no maximum range, resolution or power draw for many releases. Those exist in the platform API and in the proto encoding, so a build that shows them is OEM-patched.
Two sensors with the same name make the recent-event buffers ambiguous, and a wrong join plots live values against the wrong sensor.
This is the least stable dump in the family: its text is assembled by several different components with no schema between them.

We have a UI for this

Android Sensor Tester runs this command over USB and parses what comes back — a Chromium browser, no SDK, nothing uploaded.

Open Android Sensor Tester

Related commands

Commands that turn up in the same session as dumpsys sensorservice.

Command	What it does
getevent	Streams raw input events straight from the kernel, or lists what each input device can report.
dumpsys thermalservice	Whether the phone is throttling, and every thermal zone the hardware layer reports, in degrees Celsius.
wm size	Reports the display's resolution, or overrides it so the phone pretends to be a different screen.

More System services (dumpsys) commands

Command	What it does
dumpsys battery	The battery service's live state: level, status, health, voltage and temperature.
dumpsys diskstats	Free space per partition, a disk write latency check, and a cached per-app breakdown of what is using storage.
dumpsys meminfo	Which processes are using the most memory, measured as proportional set size.
dumpsys package	Everything the package manager knows about one app: version, paths, flags, install source and per-user state.
dumpsys activity activities	Which app is in the foreground, and the task and stack structure behind it.
dumpsys dropbox	The platform's ring buffer of crashes, ANRs and tombstones — how you read ANR traces without root.

Checked against AOSP, toybox and kernel sources while writing the parsers behind our Web ADB tools. Where a behaviour genuinely varies by Android version or manufacturer, this page says so instead of giving a number that would be wrong on half the phones out there.