Pipe into `adb shell`

Question

Why can I not pipe into adb shell?

[klm@kth ~]$ echo foo | adb shell cat
^C

The above command hangs on my 4.0.1 emulator, and I\'m

Answer 1

Here's my solution. Put the following into the adb_shell.sh file and use it instead of adb shell:

#!/bin/bash

adb forward tcp:12345 tcp:12345
adb shell busybox nc -lp 12345 -e "$@" &
sleep 1s
exec nc -q 1 localhost 12345

This creates an nc listener which runs the specified command upon the connection, and then connects to it.