'Android Stop Emulator from Command Line
This question is identical to How to shut down Android emulator via command line.
However, after attempting the suggested solution from the first answer adb emu kill has not proven successful for me.
I am automating unit tests for an android application. My bash script runs on a headless machine. It creates an android device using android create avd and executes emulator with the -no-window attribute. It then compiles the test project, connects to the emulator using adb, installs the project and executes my tests. This all works fine.
Now I need to terminate the emulator process, and just like the referenced post, I am only able to do this using kill -9.
The Google tutorial Managing AVDs from the Command Line only mentions how to stop emulators within a GUI environment.
Any help is appreciated.
Solution 1:[1]
To stop all running emulators we use this command:
adb devices | grep emulator | cut -f1 | while read line; do adb -s $line emu kill; done
Solution 2:[2]
FOR MAC:
- Run:
ps -ax | grep emulator
which gives you a wide result. Something like:
6617 ?? 9:05.54 /Users/nav/Library/Android/sdk/emulator/qemu/darwin-x86_64/qemu-system-x86_64 -netdelay none -netspeed full -avd Nexus_One_API_29
6619 ?? 0:06.10 /Users/nav/Library/Android/sdk/emulator/emulator64-crash-service -pipe com.google.AndroidEmulator.CrashService.6617 -ppid 6617 -data-dir /tmp/android-nav/
6658 ?? 0:07.93 /Users/nav/Library/Android/sdk/emulator/lib64/qt/libexec/QtWebEngineProcess --type=renderer --disable-accelerated-video-decode --disable-gpu-memory-buffer-video-frames --disable-pepper-3d-image-chromium --enable-threaded-compositing --file-url-path-alias=/gen=/Users/nav/Library/Android/sdk/emulator/lib64/qt/libexec/gen --enable-features=AllowContentInitiatedDataUrlNavigations --disable-features=MacV2Sandbox,MojoVideoCapture,SurfaceSynchronization,UseVideoCaptureApiForDevToolsSnapshots --disable-gpu-compositing --service-pipe-token=15570406721898250245 --lang=en-US --webengine-schemes=qrc:sLV --num-raster-threads=4 --enable-main-frame-before-activation --service-request-channel-token=15570406721898250245 --renderer-client-id=2
6659 ?? 0:01.11 /Users/nav/Library/Android/sdk/emulator/lib64/qt/libexec/QtWebEngineProcess --type=renderer --disable-accelerated-video-decode --disable-gpu-memory-buffer-video-frames --disable-pepper-3d-image-chromium --enable-threaded-compositing --file-url-path-alias=/gen=/Users/nav/Library/Android/sdk/emulator/lib64/qt/libexec/gen --enable-features=AllowContentInitiatedDataUrlNavigations --disable-features=MacV2Sandbox,MojoVideoCapture,SurfaceSynchronization,UseVideoCaptureApiForDevToolsSnapshots --disable-gpu-compositing --service-pipe-token=--lang=en-US --webengine-schemes=qrc:sLV --num-raster-threads=4 --enable-main-frame-before-activation --service-request-channel-token= --renderer-client-id=3
10030 ttys000 0:00.00 grep emulator
The first (left) column is the process ID (PID) that you are looking for.
Find the PID in the first (top) row. In the above example, it's
6617.Kill that process:
kill PID
In my case, the command is:
kill 6617
Usually, killing the first process in enough to stop the emulator, but if that doesn't work, you can:
5.1. try killing other processes as well.
5.2 kill with
-9(force kill):
kill -9 PID
Solution 3:[3]
if
adb kill-server
doesn't work. Use :
adb emu kill
this will kill all the emulators
If multiple emulators are present then use:
adb -s * emu kill
Solution 4:[4]
Sometimes the command
adb -s emulator-5554 emu kill
did not work on my CI servers or desktops, for unknown reason. I think on Windows it's OK to kill the process of qemu, just like
Taskkill /IM qemu-system-x86_64.exe /F /T
Solution 5:[5]
I can close it with:
adb shell reboot -p
Solution 6:[6]
The other answer didn't work for me (on Windows 7). But this worked:
telnet localhost 5554
kill
Solution 7:[7]
Why not just do
adb reboot bootloader
Solution 8:[8]
adb kill-server will kill all emulators and restart the server clean.
Solution 9:[9]
None of the solutions worked for me. I had to go the telnet way including authentication:
AUTH=$(cat "$HOME/.emulator_console_auth_token")
expect << EOF
spawn telnet localhost 5554
expect "OK"
send "auth $AUTH\r"
expect "OK"
send "kill\r"
expect "OK"
send "exit\r"
EOF
The full script can be obtained with a free license from https://github.com/kullo/android-emulator-tools
Update: looks like this still does not reliably close the console and ADB ports (e.g. 5554,5555)
Solution 10:[10]
I use this one-liner, broken into several lines for readability:
adb devices |
perl -nle 'print $1 if /emulator-(\d+).device$/' |
xargs -t -l1 -i bash -c "
( echo auth $(cat $HOME/.emulator_console_auth_token) ;
echo kill ;
yes ) |
telnet localhost {}"
Solution 11:[11]
If you don't want to have to know the serial name of your device for adb -s emulator-5554 emu kill, then you can just use adb -e emu kill to kill a single emulator. This won't kill anything if you have more than one emulator running at once, but it's useful for automation where you start and stop a single emulator for a test.
Solution 12:[12]
To automate this, you can use any script or app that can send a string to a socket. I personally like nc (netcat) under cygwin. As I said before, I use it like this:
$ echo kill | nc -w 2 localhost 5554
(that means to send "kill" string to the port 5554 on localhost, and terminate netcat after 2 seconds.)
Solution 13:[13]
This scrips can help you to kill All emulators at once:
- Filter emulators (because you can have a mixing on physical and emus)
- Kill all emus by ADB id
Disadvantage of this solution: if your emu just "stuck" you can't kill it with adb command and it required process kill. But that's very rare case.
while [ "`adb devices | grep -Eoh \"emulator-\d{0,4}\" | wc -l | tr -d ' '`" != "0" ]; do
echo "Connected emulators:"
adb devices | grep -Eoh "emulator-\d{0,4}"
for emulator in $(adb devices | grep -Eoh "emulator-\d{0,4}")
do
echo "Killing the emulator: $emulator"
adb -s "$emulator" emu kill | true
done
sleep 10;
done
echo "All emus has been killed"
Solution 14:[14]
To Run and stop an emulator, and clear data
From the Virtual tab, you can perform the following operations on an emulator:
- To run an emulator that uses an AVD, click Launch.
- To stop a running emulator, click Menu and select Stop.
- To clear the data for an emulator, select Wipe Data. Or click Menu and select Wipe Data.
Solution 15:[15]
List of devices attached emulator-5584 host emulator-5580 host emulator-5576 host emulator-5572 host emulator-5568 host emulator-5564 host emulator-5560 host
C:\Users\Administrator>adb -s emulator-5584 emu kill error: could not connect to TCP port 5584: cannot connect to 127.0.0.1:5584: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. (10061)
NOTE: gui of emulator is not running but still it's showing
SOLUTION:
adb kill-server
start emulator using:
emulator.exe -netdelay none -netspeed full -avd Nexus_5X_API_19
Solution 16:[16]
On Windows 10, with Android Studio 2021.1.1 patch 3, the adb -s emulator-5554 emu kill command does not work, adb being not recognized.
But here's the solution using the Tool/Device Manager. Simply select the active emulator and click on x to stop it.
Solution 17:[17]
On Linux when the process became unresponsive the only way I could terminate the emulator was using the command:
kill -9 `pidof adb`
which finds the process ID of adb and sends a kill -9 signal to it.
Sources
This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Source: Stack Overflow

