How to get the build.prop values?

Question

How do I get the build.prop values that are found in /system/build.prop without root access? How do I edit them?

Answer 1

I have checked multiple devices including some Samsung and LG devices as well as a Nexus 4, latest one was the Nvidia Shield Tablet with Android 6.0. On all devices ll on /system/build.prop gave me this result(of course with varying size and date of build.prop):

-rw-r--r-- root root 3069 2015-10-13 21:48 build.prop

This means that anyone and any app without any permissions can read the file. Root would only be required for writing the non "ro."-values. You could just create a new BufferedReader(new FileReader("/system/build.prop")) and read all lines.

Advantages of this approach:

• no need for reflection (SystemProperties.get)
• no need to spawn a Process and executing getprop

Disadvantages:

• does not contain all system properties (some values e.g. are set at boot only available at runtime)
• not handy for getting a specific value compared to SystemProperties.get