How can I determine storage directory from ADB?

Question

Is there a way I can use ADB to determine the external storage directory (equivalent of the Android API call Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory())?

Answer 1

adb shell echo $EXTERNAL_STORAGE. All credit goes to Flow for leading me to experiment and find this.

Naturally you can use cd $EXTERNAL_STORAGE or whatever else you might need during an adb shell session.

Answer 2

I don't think that this is possible. See Matthew's Post

But let's have a lock on how Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory() returns the external storage directory. A quick look in android/os/Environment.java shows that all this method does, is returning a static constant File member called EXTERNAL_STORAGE_DIRECTORY. This constant is initialized by

private static final File EXTERNAL_STORAGE_DIRECTORY
        = getDirectory("EXTERNAL_STORAGE", "/sdcard");

which calls getDirectory()

static File getDirectory(String variableName, String defaultPath) {
    String path = System.getenv(variableName);
    return path == null ? new File(defaultPath) : new File(path);
}

So the external storage directory is nothing else then an java System environment variable (or a predefined default). You could try to follow this trace further. Maybe the external storage directory is just a hard coded path in some configuration file on the filesystem. Or maybe there is a way to read out these environment variables via adb that I don't know.