Basically it'll tell am (Activity manager) to start an Activity. See here for more detailed info: http://developer.android.com/tools/help/adb.html#shellcommands...
I am pretty sure that awk is not part of the default android installation. If you run linux you can use: adb shell cat /proc/uptime | awk ... ...
android,adb,android-contentprovider,android-shell
There is a content command: usage: adb shell content [subcommand] [options] usage: adb shell content insert --uri <URI> [--user <USER_ID>] --bind <BINDING> [--bind <BINDING>...] <URI> a content provider URI. <BINDING> binds a typed value to a column and is formatted: <COLUMN_NAME>:<TYPE>:<COLUMN_VALUE> where: <TYPE> specifies data type such as: b -...