title: is there a reliable way to find the path of a physical SD card
body: <p>I know that this topic is actively discussed, but I couldn't find a proper answer. I'm creating a simple file explorer as a part of my app and currently I'm completely confused by the android file system.</p>
  
  <p>First question: I'm testing on LG Nexus 5 which does not have a physical SD of course. <code>Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory()</code> returns <strong>/storage/emulated/0</strong> and I'm able to list all of my dirs and files using this path. But now the magic begins:</p>
  
  <p>Using the shell I could find 2 dirs (<em>/emulated/legacy</em> and <em>sdcard0</em>) with the same content (same result as when using <code>Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory()</code>). But there is no <em>../emulated/0</em>  path which is given by the above method o.0  What the hell is this?</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/CtGNG.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/7UNgV.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>Second question: as far as I could understand, the only way of finding a <strong>physical SD card</strong> is finding the list of paths used by different manufacturers and checking if any of them exists. Is that correct? </p>