fb-adb is a tool for interacting with Android systems. It does much of what adb does, but with better remote shell support and, hopefully, fewer bugs. Differences between adb and fb-adb are that fb-adb:

• binary clean (no LF -> CRLF mangling)
• transmits and updates window size
• distinguishes standard output and standard error
• properly muxes streams with independent flow control
• allows for ssh-like pty allocation control
• propagates program exit status instead of always exiting with status 0
• properly escapes program arguments
• kills remote program
• provides a generic facility to elevate to root without re-escaping

An out-of-tree build is required. You'll need a copy of the Android NDK: tell configure about it by setting the ANDROID_NDK environment variable to your NDK path or by using the --with-android-ndk argument to the configure script.

For example:

./autogen.sh
export ANDROID_NDK=/path/to/android-ndk
mkdir build
cd build
../configure
make

The fb-adb executable itself has no dependencies other than the adb executable, which must be on PATH. Generally, you can use fb-adb just like adb; fb-adb forwards unknown commands to adb. fb-adb supports the same device-selection options that adb does.

fb-adb shell is the fancy shell command that supports the features described above. Run fb-adb shell -h for additional options.