It might be because you need to pass the commands to su
as parameters like this:
su -c 'ls -l'
Or you might need to specify the full path to su
, but I don't see why it wouldn't work the way you have it:
Runtime.exec("/system/bin/su -c ps")
Or maybeRuntime.exec("/system/bin/su -c \'ps\'")
Try checking the output of this command too: System.getenv("PATH")
Another variant could be Runtime.exec("su -c \'ls -s \'")
Make sure you don't forget to escape the single quotes as they are part of the actual String
.
Thats the way that I've found works most consistently, and it has also worked on devices that don't have Superuser or SuperSU installed, as those apps only listen for the Broadcast that is sent out when an application tries to run a command as root. @Boardy SuperSU and Superuser intercept the broadcast and so act as a middle man between the app and root privileges, but its not necessary for a rooted device. It IS necessary if you want to have more control over the applications that are running commands as root, but even then it still only limits you to deciding which applications, not which commands, are given root privileges.
Also, you might wanna take a look at RootTools and more specifically, the RootTools.isAccessGiven()
command, which requests root privileges for your app.