recat

A colorful and highly configurable alternative to the adb logcat command from the Android SDK with on the fly deobfuscation! (based on Marshall Culpepper's great logcat-color).

recat uses pyretrace to deobfuscate logs.

Note: recat (logcat-color) is targetted at OS X and Linux, and does not currently work in Windows.

Installation

Installation via pip

$ pip install recat-color

Installation from source (requires setuptools, may require sudo)

You can clone the recat git repository directly:

$ git clone https://github.com/EverythingMe/recat.git

To install logcat-color from the source directory, run:

$ sudo pip install .

or

$ sudo python setup.py install

Examples

for logcat-color usage examples, configuration and profiles, go to (logcat-color's original README)

Deobfuscation

recat retraces obfuscated logs using pyretrace, a python reimplementation on Proguard's Retrace, with a deobfuscation API for python.

When looking at logs from an obfuscated release build, trace messages are obfuscated too, here's a crash log from EverythingMe Launcher's release build:

Supplying a mapping file path as a command line argument will trigger the deobfuscation mechanism, causing every log line to go through pyretrace's deobfuscator.

$ recat -m path/to/mapping/file.txt

Same log, now with mapping file path added:

This will make the best effort to deobfuscate the 'message' in each line.

Deobfuscating tags

The following snippet is taken from iosched. It became a pretty popular strategy for log tag creation.

    public static String makeLogTag(String str) {
        if (str.length() > MAX_LOG_TAG_LENGTH - LOG_PREFIX_LENGTH) {
            return LOG_PREFIX + str.substring(0, MAX_LOG_TAG_LENGTH - LOG_PREFIX_LENGTH - 1);
        }

        return LOG_PREFIX + str;
    }

    /**
     * Don't use this when obfuscating class names!
     */
    public static String makeLogTag(Class cls) {
        return makeLogTag(cls.getSimpleName());
    }

If you use this type of deobfuscation and wish to deobfuscate the tag as well, you must supply a prefix for your tags (i.e. LOG_PREFIX), here's an example:

EverythingMe Launcher used ev. as its base log prefix, adding -t ev will now deobfuscate the tags as well:

$ recat -m path/to/mapping/file.txt -t ev

Same output, now with deobfuscated tags:

TODO - Mapping Fetcher

I also added a skeleton for a mapping file fetcher. It should auto download a mapping file from a file server by supplying a mapping file path template.

Thanks

Thanks to Marshall Culpepper for the great logcat-color.