File structure incongruence - can't find folder that must be there

[Guest seanspotatobusiness]

According to the app DiskUsage on my Hudl I have a folder at:

 

Storage card/media/Download/

 

where storage card is 9342 MB and must therefore be the internal flash memory.

 

According to ES File Explorer and Windows File Explorer (Win 7), there is no media folder at this location. I can however get to this location in ES File Explorer if I open the location using DiskUsage. However, when I go up the file structure, if I go past

 

Using wile and cunning, I've determined that the folder is inside a file called '0' at \storage\emulated\ (curiously there are two folders called 'storage' shown in Windows File Explorer). Is there any way, in Windows, of getting past this 0 to the files and folders it guards?

[Guest seanspotatobusiness]

My smart android friend says that the 0 is a symbolic link and further the command

adb shell "ls /mnt/shell/emulated/0"

yields the list of files but I still don't know what's going on or why Windows can't see past this symbolic link.

[Guest glossywhite]

Install "Terminal Emulator" and then open it, navigate to the required directory and enter:

ls -la

A directory listing will appear. When you see entries that look like this:

somename -> /some/path/to/actual

... the arrow denotes the item preceding it is a symlink, and the item following it is the path to the item to which it points; ie, the item you want.

You must also understand that Linux is an OS where "everything is a file", or every part of the filesystem is seen as a 'file' to Linux, which is why it's so elegant and so well loved.

For example:

/dev/null

is seen as a 'file', but is, in fact, a 'black hole' where you, or Linux, may direct streams of data that you want to go nowhere, for whatever purpose. Also:

/dev/urandom

is also seen as a 'file', but in fact is a random number generator node, which you may redirect anywhere else in the filesystem for whatever purpose.

I hope this hasn't been too baffling. For more, see: http://www.linux.org/threads/in-linux-everything-is-a-file.4245/

Edited January 29, 2015 by glossywhite

[Guest Mark_He]

My smart android friend says that the 0 is a symbolic link and further the command

adb shell "ls /mnt/shell/emulated/0"

yields the list of files but I still don't know what's going on or why Windows can't see past this symbolic link.

Well, the symbolic link is essentially an instruction to go look somewhere else, written in a language that Windows stubbornly refuses to learn.

[Guest glossywhite]

Well, the symbolic link is essentially an instruction to go look somewhere else, written in a language that Windows stubbornly refuses to learn.

I don't think it's a matter of Windows "refusing to learn" so much, more than a completely different OS design and architecture, altogether. Windows has very similar (but oft unknown) functionality in the form of "mklink": https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753194.aspx - but yes, it is not the same as the "ln" command (how you create a symlink in Linux/Mac OS X, etc).