Top 10 Hadoop Shell Commands to Manage HDFS

So you already know what Hadoop is? Why it is used? What problems you can solve with it?  And you want to know how you can deal with files on HDFS?  Don’t worry, you are at the right place.

In this article I will present Top 10 basic Hadoop HDFS operations managed through shell commands which are useful to manage files on HDFS clusters; for testing purposes, you can invoke this commands using either some of the VMs from Cloudera, Hortonworks, etc. or if you have your own setup of pseudo distributed cluster.

Let’s get started.

1. Create a directory in HDFS at given path(s).

Usage:
hadoop fs -mkdir <paths>
Example:
hadoop fs -mkdir /user/saurzcode/dir1 /user/saurzcode/dir2

2.  List the contents of a directory.

Usage :
hadoop fs -ls <args>
Example:
hadoop fs -ls /user/saurzcode

3. Upload and download a file in HDFS.

Upload:

hadoop fs -put:

Copy single src file, or multiple src files from local file system to the Hadoop data file system

Usage:
hadoop fs -put <localsrc> ... <HDFS_dest_Path>
Example:
hadoop fs -put /home/saurzcode/Samplefile.txt  /user/saurzcode/dir3/

Download:

hadoop fs -get:

Copies/Downloads files to the local file system

Usage:
hadoop fs -get <hdfs_src> <localdst>
Example:
hadoop fs -get /user/saurzcode/dir3/Samplefile.txt /home/

4. See contents of a file

Same as unix cat command:

Usage:
hadoop fs -cat <path[filename]>
Example:
hadoop fs -cat /user/saurzcode/dir1/abc.txt

5. Copy a file from source to destination

This command allows multiple sources as well in which case the destination must be a directory.

Usage:
hadoop fs -cp <source> <dest>
Example:
hadoop fs -cp /user/saurzcode/dir1/abc.txt /user/saurzcode/dir2

6. Copy a file from/To Local file system to HDFS

copyFromLocal

Usage:
hadoop fs -copyFromLocal <localsrc> URI
Example:
hadoop fs -copyFromLocal /home/saurzcode/abc.txt  /user/saurzcode/abc.txt

Similar to put command, except that the source is restricted to a local file reference.

copyToLocal

Usage:
hadoop fs -copyToLocal [-ignorecrc] [-crc] URI <localdst>

Similar to get command, except that the destination is restricted to a local file reference.

7. Move file from source to destination.

Note:- Moving files across filesystem is not permitted.

Usage :
hadoop fs -mv <src> <dest>
Example:
hadoop fs -mv /user/saurzcode/dir1/abc.txt /user/saurzcode/dir2

8. Remove a file or directory in HDFS.

Remove files specified as argument. Deletes directory only when it is empty

Usage :
hadoop fs -rm <arg>
Example:
hadoop fs -rm /user/saurzcode/dir1/abc.txt

Recursive version of delete.

Usage :
hadoop fs -rmr <arg>
Example:
hadoop fs -rmr /user/saurzcode/

9. Display last few lines of a file.

Similar to tail command in Unix.

Usage :
hadoop fs -tail <path[filename]>
Example:
hadoop fs -tail /user/saurzcode/dir1/abc.txt

10. Display the aggregate length of a file.

Usage :
hadoop fs -du <path>
Example:
hadoop fs -du /user/saurzcode/dir1/abc.txt

Please comment which of these commands you found most useful while dealing with Hadoop /HDFS.