Showing Logs on ADB

Displaying and filtering with Logcat

Displaying all the logs from the default buffer on the Command Line can be accomplished by:

adb logcat

This command will show you all the logs from the device’s main buffer. Notice that if you use it for the first time, you’ll get a lot of information, an enormous stream of data. So you may want to clear the logs first…

Cleaning the logs:

adb logcat -c

This will clean clear the logs, and start fresh.

Displaying Alternate Buffers

There are two other buffers besides the main buffer that may be displayed as follows:

adb logcat -b buffer_name,

where buffer_name is one of the following:

radio - view the buffer that contains radio/telephony related messages.
events - view the buffer containing events-related messages.
main - view the main log buffer (default)

Filtering Log Output

Logcat logs got so called levels:

V — Verbose, D — Debug, I — Info, W — Warning, E — Error, F — Fatal, S — Silent

Those levels are specified when application uses those Log function:

Log.v(); // Verbose
Log.d(); // Debug
Log.i(); // Info
Log.w(); // Warning
Log.e(); // Error

if your code Log call is:

Log.i("MainActivtyTag", "Showing the very first fragment");

in logcat you’ll see this output:

07-27 11:34:21.027 I MainActivtyTag 66 : Showing the very first fragment

So, this is the log convention:

<timestamp> <logLevel> <tag> <line> : <messge>

For instance, if you want to show all the logs that have Fatal (F) level:

adb logcat *:F

* is a what called a wild card - stands for all package names

Filtering by application package name

Since package names are guaranteed to be unique , you can filter logcat by your package name, of course you can combine it with the Level filter:

adb logcat <package name>:<log level>

For exiting/interrupting process - press Ctrl + X