How can I bind my Android file system to my Linux machine, and modify it? When I plug in my Android device, it seems to use one USB interface but I couldn't find whre the mount point is. I checked /mnt but there is nothing.
5 Answers
Some phones have icky USB storage interfaces, which don't work on Linux reliably (look here for example), others (e.g. my Samsung Galaxy with Android 4.3) seem not to offer USB access to their innards at all (nothing in the logs when plugging it in). Some need to be set up specially (allow USB in their configuration) to mount them.
If you have a newer smartphone that uses MTP/PTP protocol, I'm afraid you can't mount it to the filesystem and access it as a regular drive device with just a mount command - similar discussion here.
To make this work, you need some kind of virtual file system tool. I believe gvfs should do the trick. To make this mounting automatic, a daemon has to be running in the background. Search for gvfs, gvfs-mtp, gvfs-fuse, gvfs-deamons, etc. in your package manager.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_file_system
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Media_Transfer_Protocol
https://superuser.com/questions/1157661/how-to-mount-an-android-smartphone-as-a-drive-in-windows
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It is unclear from your description how to used
gvfsor alternatives. Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 19:43 -
It depends on distribution and system configuration. Try to search for gvfs manual in your distribution's wiki. Commented Jan 25, 2022 at 15:08
MTPFS is likely what you want, it's FUSE based, but there is no reason that that wouldn't work (outside of device-specific issues)
After installing it :
Add yourself to plugdev group (to have the needed permissions)
gpasswd -a <USER_NAME> plugdev
Then, just run
mtpfs <empty folder>
To unmount :
fusermount -u <folder>
answered Jan 24, 2022 at 11:14
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I could not find
mtpfsfor Ubuntu, but I foundjmtpfs. When running that as normal user or as root I get:No mtp devices found.My phone "Select USB configuration" > "Media Transfer Protocol (MTP)" and plugged in USB. Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 20:03
I wouldn't expect to find a reliable solution that would work with USB cable, the general trend in the industry is to go fully wireless.
The method I used for a couple of years and that works with various Android devices and that works well and that doesn't require rooted device is to use SimpleSSHD on your Android device and sshfs on your desktop Linux machine.
Install and setup SimpleSSHD on your Android device and use sshfs on desktop Linux machine like that:
sshfs <PHONE_IP_ADDRESS>:<PATH_ON_ANDROID> <LOCAL_DIR>
For example, this is the command I use to mount Gallery from my Galaxy S8 phone on my Slackware system:
$ mkdir gallery
$ sshfs phone:/sdcard/DCIM/Camera gallery
phone is an alias I defined in ~/.ssh/config:
Host phone
User shell
Hostname Galaxy-S8
Port 2222
Of course it requires your Android device and your Linux machine to be in the same network.
Unmount local dir without root:
fusermount -u gallery
Last time I checked SimpleSSHD was a re-packaged Dropebar binary for ARM.
answered Jan 22, 2022 at 15:21
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sshfs 192.168.1.230:/ phone/; ls phone/givesls: reading directory 'phone/': Permission denied. Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 19:38 -
You don't have a rooted device, you won't be able to access
/like that. Rooting an Android device is a separate issue. Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 19:45 -
I do not want to root my device, but I want access to all the files I have access to. In other words: I want to be able to do a
find dirand see all the files I have access to indir. Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 19:59 -
That's possible only if you have a rooted device, normally you don't have access to
/but to SD Card and several other directories. Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 20:05 -
You misunderstand me. The solution I am looking for should know this and give access to the dirs I have access to. I am not looking for a solution where you need to root your phone, but simply one that will give me the same access as any filemanager app on the phone already give. Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 20:08
ADBFS-rootless is another option, that works better for me than the other alternatives in this thread, when proper SSH is not setup to also work via USB-NET/JumpHost.
It's trivial to compile, the usual small dance:
git clone git://github.com/spion/adbfs-rootless.git
cd adbfs-rootless
make
maybe install libfuse-dev android-tools-adb build-essential git pkg-config before.
Then mount your local usb-connected Android device with ./adbfs ~/droid.
It's originally "configured" to only connect to local ADB devices via source, but can be trivially patched to connect to remotely usb-connected Android devices, using the remote ADBd on the USB-Host as "Jumphost".
You can also use it with USB-IP to connect to Android-devices hooked up to the USB of some WIFI-APs/Routers that way.
If you need to connect to ancient versions of Android, you may need to get statically compiled adb versions for different API-levels, and just make several adbfs-binaries with hardcoded paths to specific adb-versions.
answered Jan 24, 2022 at 12:28
man simple-mtpfs