I understood that the physical folders I referred to are also part of the metadata folder structure.
When I open the 'Folders' tab in SAS Management Console this folder structure is indeed there (starting from 'Shared Data'). By requesting the folder properties of all subfolders I can find out which users and groups are authorized to the selected folder. This information however I would like to retrieve programmatically to eliminate the manual work to investigate this.
And as Kurt states: it is on Windows indeed...