Presses a hardware or virtual key — Home, Back, Power, volume, Enter.
input keyevent <code or name>| Token | Meaning |
|---|---|
| <code> | The numeric key code. Names are also accepted on modern builds, but numbers work everywhere. |
input keyevent 3Home.
input keyevent 4Back.
input keyevent 26Power — locks or wakes the screen.
input keyevent 187The recents / app-switch key.
Nothing. The phone reacts, or it does not; there is no confirmation either way.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| (no output) | The key event was injected. |
Individually harmless, but some codes have consequences: 26 is the power button, so it locks or wakes the screen, and a key sent into the wrong app is a tap you did not mean to make. Nothing here is destructive and nothing needs undoing.
Android ADB Toolbox runs this command over USB and parses what comes back — a Chromium browser, no SDK, nothing uploaded.
Commands that turn up in the same session as input keyevent.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
| input text | Types a string into whatever field currently has focus. |
| getevent | Streams raw input events straight from the kernel, or lists what each input device can report. |
| screencap | Takes a screenshot, either to a file on the phone or to standard output as PNG. |
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.
Switch on developer options and USB debugging on the phone, plug it in, then run `adb shell <command>` 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.
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.
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.
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.
Would rather click than type? The Web ADB Toolkit runs commands like this from a browser over USB. Or browse every command.