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PID Cat

An update to Jeff Sharkey's excellent logcat color script which only shows log entries for processes from a specific application package.

During application development you often want to only display log messages coming from your app. Unfortunately, because the process ID changes every time you deploy to the phone it becomes a challenge to grep for the right thing.

This script solves that problem by filtering by application package. Supply the target package as the sole argument to the python script and enjoy a more convenient development process.

pidcat com.oprah.bees.android

Here is an example of the output when running for the Google Plus app:

Example screen

Install

Get the script:

Make sure that adb from the Android SDK is on your PATH. This script will not work unless this is that case. That means, when you type adb and press enter into your terminal something actually happens.

To include adb and other android tools on your path:

export PATH=$PATH:<path to Android SDK>/platform-tools
export PATH=$PATH:<path to Android SDK>/tools

Include these lines in your .bashrc or .zshrc.

Note: <path to Android SDK> should be absolute and not relative.

pidcat requires at least version 8.30 of coreutils. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS already ships with it, for 18.04 and below, coreutils can be upgraded from the focal repo by running the following:

sudo add-apt-repository 'deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal main restricted universe multiverse'
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -t focal install coreutils