Android - On Android can I write scripts (similar to Win .bat files) to combine several command line commands?

Android's shell will support a limited amount of Unix-style shell scripting. It specifically should have a shell at /system/bin/sh that you can use, however:

  1. The shell provided with Android has a severely restricted set of commands available to it. If you want to do anything even remotely complex you'll need a busybox install (or another shell).
  2. It's generally pretty rare for Android apps to provide any kind of command line interface or binaries. I very much doubt that Sugarsync, for example, allows you to perform a sync from the command line.

If you want a bit of a GUI you may want to look at something like GScript.


There are a few Android apps that are able to control other Android apps, and can chain several commands together using their GUI in a similar way to a script, they both have plugins to extend their support to many popular Android apps and functions.

Tasker and Locale are probably the most famous of these (see here for some comparison) but there are also other similar (free) apps that you could look at.