Copy Android LogCat / Log Contents From a Device With adb

It’s a bummer when your Android application crashes while you’re away from a computer.

Luckily, there’s a simple adb command that will dump the contents of logcat’s ring buffer to your local disk, so you can examine the cause of the crash:

adb logcat -d -v time > logcat.txt

This will copy the phone’s log to a local file called logcat.txt and add time-stamps to the log entries. On my Galaxy Nexus the ring buffer is 256 Kb, which translates to around 12 hours of log history.