How do I send an SMS from a shell?

Question

I would like to be able to send an actual SMS message from a shell using just the command line and not relying on any apk to do so. I am interested in sending this message between phones, not from the emulator to the phone. For example, by running the command:

service call phone 2 s16 "1234567890"

I can place a call from phone to phone using the command line. The 'service list' command shows an isms service, which I can't seem to provide the correct arguments for. I would assume that one of the args should be a PDU string but haven't had any luck so far.

score 44 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 10 '12 at 13:41

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In fact, this can be done but requires adb to be installed (Part of the android SDK)

adb shell am start -a android.intent.action.SENDTO -d sms:CCXXXXXXXXXX --es sms_body "SMS BODY GOES HERE" --ez exit_on_sent true
adb shell input keyevent 22
adb shell input keyevent 66

Where CCXXXXXXXXXX is country-code followed by phone number. This may not work correctly on non-standard android installations, you will need to find the correct keyevent values to pass.

answered Jul 10 '12 at 13:41

arpz

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Do you know how can I escape double quotes for the sms body? – Edgar Villegas Alvarado Jan 13 '13 at 18:38
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@EdgarVillegasAlvarado, easily: `"He said \"Ok\""` – kolypto Apr 12 '13 at 14:08
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how can we go ahead and have the keyevent(s) automatic as well? – thevoipman Jul 31 '13 at 22:30
how can we run the first command with/to a device via wifi/tcp? – thevoipman Jul 31 '13 at 23:21
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general question, how do you find this commands? can I somehow hook another functions? – deadfish Mar 04 '14 at 09:54
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You could start off by looking at this page - http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent.html – arpz Mar 04 '14 at 13:16
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This isnt working for me - it fills the body, however it doesnt send... Any ideas>? – amartin94 May 26 '15 at 16:16
is there any warning or limit if I try to send more than 100 sms? – Muhammad Saqib Jan 21 '16 at 20:47
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To send more than one consecutive SMS message to the same number, send 'adb shell input keyevent 4' to close the current conversation. – gooseberry Jun 10 '16 at 02:27
Tried with Android 6, it composes the message but not sending the sms. Technically the keyevent not working as expected. Any update on this? – Gopichandar Nov 22 '16 at 18:23
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Perfect SMS messenger for this is Textra. It's properly getting sms_body and can send message on ENTER event. – Евгений Антипов Jun 29 '17 at 20:32
@thevoipman to send message I am using a dirty way but it gets the job done simply use a tap event – Mahesh Jamdade Apr 28 '19 at 04:34

score 11 · Answer 2 · edited May 30 '17 at 06:17

You can telnet to the emulator doing something similar to "telnet localhost 5554", where 5554 is the port the emulator is listening on. After that, you can send an sms message by doing the following:

sms send 1234 "Hello"

The 1234 can be any string of digits. Enclose the message in quotes if you are including spaces.

edit: an sms command doesn't exist in Android on real devices, it's an emulator-only feature to fake an SMS receiving not sending. It's just a convenience for emulated devices that don't have access to any actual cellular network.

cf. http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/devices/emulator.html#sms

score 10 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 19 '13 at 20:20

10

How about this?

service call isms 5 s16 "+??????????" i32 0 i32 0 s16 "SMS TEXT HERE"

answered Feb 19 '13 at 20:20

Dmitry

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Got an obfuscated "attempt to get length of null array" error. – d33tah Jan 04 '19 at 18:43

score 7 · Answer 4 · answered May 30 '13 at 23:51

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I don't have enough reputation points up upvote the answer given by Dmitry, but that IS the answer that works with one minor modification: At least for a US number, instead of putting a plus-sign (+) it worked for me with a "1" e.g. 17079876543 ...

service call isms 5 s16 "17079876543" i32 0 i32 0 s16 "SMS TEXT HERE"

Oh boy oh boy oh boy ... now if I can figure out how to receive SMS over the command line and combine that with emacs (in an emacs shell say - he begins to rub his hands together and crack a slanted grin ... and think about all the other command line levers we can pull!)

answered May 30 '13 at 23:51

Mylo Stone

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Working perfectly fine. But how can I add spaces ? Spaces wont work with this. As an example if I send "SMS TEXT HERE" it only send the SMS part – rafalefighter Jan 15 '17 at 05:37
@gripen Hmmm, I wonder if using nested single-inside-double quotes (or vice-versa) would make a difference ... i.e. '"SMS TEXT HERE"' or "'SMS TEXT HERE'" – Mylo Stone Oct 31 '18 at 23:48

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 28 '10 at 16:56

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You can send any intent you want from the command line, so it's merely a matter of figuring out what intent can be used to send an sms, or if one doesn't exist, then writing an apk which provides such intent-to-sms capability and sending the intent to trigger that from the command line.

If you end up writing an apk to do that, think a little bit about permissions. Which user will the command line be running as - the adb shell user? any old ordinary app user? Your apk will presumably have sms permissions, but do you want to extent that to everything on the phone, or implement some security mechanism in your intent?

answered Oct 28 '10 at 16:56

Chris Stratton

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Thanks Chris, I think I am on the right track with that line of thought. So far I've managed to get pretty close with the command "am start -a android.intent.action.SENDTO -d sms:1234567890 --es sms_body ohai --ez exit_on_sent true" but I still need to figure out how to trigger the view's onClick/onEditorAction automatically. Looking through the MMS source code I found the mSendButton view that I think I need to trigger a performClick() on. If I do get a working command or pair of commands I will def update this further. – reproba Nov 01 '10 at 20:14
It may be that user interaction is required to go that route - if there doesn't seem to be a stage where sms permission is required, the platform design philosophy would require user approval in place of permission. So you might want to take the other half of the idea and implement your own intent-driven sms sender apk, non-interactive, with sms permission. And hopefully with some kind of security mechanism so it only works for your intended purpose. – Chris Stratton Nov 01 '10 at 20:20

How do I send an SMS from a shell?

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