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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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?

Answer 3

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!)

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

How about this?

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