Hadoop Commands to Manage Files on HDFS

This tutorial help you to learn to manage our files in HDFS. You will learn how to create, upload, download and list contents in HDFS. Below commands will help you to how to create directory structure in HDFS, Copy files from local file system to HDFS and download files from HDFS to local files. Also how to do manage files in HDFS.

Create Directory in HDFS

Takes the path uri’s as an argument and creates a directory or multiple directories.

$ hdfs dfs -mkdir 

Remember that you must create home directory in HDFS with your system’s username. For example you are logged in as hduser on your system, So first create /user/hduser else you will get this error, Now create directory structure inside it

$ hdfs dfs -mkdir /user/hduser
$ hdfs dfs -mkdir /user/hduser/input
$ hdfs dfs -mkdir /user/hduser/output 
$ hdfs dfs -mkdir /user/hduser/input/text  /user/hadoop/input/xml

Copy Files to HDFS

After creating directory structure, Now put some files to HDFS from your local file system.

$ hdfs dfs -put  ... 

For example you have test1.txt in current directory and /tmp/test2.xml on your local file system.

$ hdfs dfs -put text1.txt /user/hduser/input/text/
$ hdfs dfs -put /tmp/text2.xml /user/hduser/input/xml/

List Files from HDFS

Use the following example commands to list content of directory in HDFS.

$ hdfs dfs -ls /user/hduser
$ hdfs dfs -ls /user/hduser/input/
$ hdfs dfs -ls /user/hduser/input/text/

Use -R to list files recursively inside directories. For example:

$ hdfs dfs -ls -R /user/hadoop/input/

Download Files from HDFS

At this point you have learned how to copy and list files to HDFS. Now use following example commands to how to download/Copy files from HDFS to local file system.

$ hdfs dfs -get /user/hduser/input/text/test1.txt /tmp/
$ hdfs dfs -get /user/hadoop/dir1/xml/test2.xml /tmp/

here /tmp is on system’s local file system.

Copy Files between HDFS Directories

You can easily copy files between HDFS file system using distcp

$ hdfs distcp /user/hduser/input/xml/text2.xml /user/hduser/output
$ hdfs distcp /user/hduser/input/text/text1.xml /user/hduser/output