Access Your Shell via SMS with Remote Terminal

XDA

By egzthunder1

Published May 15, 2013

One of the single most important aspects of mobile devices is that they are always connected in some form or fashion. It gives us the ability to sync our content across a wide variety of platforms and devices without needing to have the physical devices in hand. You also get chances to control other peripherals with the help of certain apps, such as being able to mirror your screen onto a TV. Interestingly enough, communications from one of these devices involves not just your ability to do things with it that may affect other devices, but the inverse also can be applied. In other words, you can control your device as well from remote locations/other devices. While we know that there are various apps that will enable some functionality, XDA Forum Member RavinduSha came up with a rather interesting tool that can indeed be a bit of a life saver on certain situations.

Remote Terminal is an app that allows you to access your shell AND execute commands by simply typing an SMS and sending it to the target device. This is like having the terminal emulator open in front of you, but without actually having it. The app listens to any SMS coming into the device and will analyze the content. If the contents are commands for shell, the app will run them (as long as the password is present in the SMS). All commands can be used, from pulling a logcat to creating a directory and even deleting stuff in your device. This, of course, is an app that will carry root level permissions and as such, you will have full control over the device with it. Because of this, it will be on your best interest to ensure that you use a good enough password to prevent other people from "guessing" to try and gain control of your device.

If you decide that this is indeed a tool you need to have, make sure that you run it at least once as you will need to grant it Super User permissions. Please take it for a spin and see if you would like to have improvements done on it or if you come across any bugs. If you try it and get nothing else out of this piece, at the very least remember these 4 simple words: "use a strong password."

Have fun!