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CSC 369 Distributed Computing Alexander Dekhtyar

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Hadoop File System

HDFS Basics

Hadoop File System or HDFS is a distributed file system that resides on top
of the filesystems in of the compute nodes forming a Hadoop cluster.
HDFS has the following properties:

1. Distributed file storage. All data stored on HDFS is accessible from all
Hadoop nodes.

2. Optimized for very large file storage. HDFS stores files in blocks of 64
MB. This means that a single disk read operation can bring 64 Mb of
data directly to a compute node.

3. Support for write-once, read-many access parttern. HDFS is largely

designed for the following pattern of use:

• A data file is uploaded to HDFS once.

• A large number of analytical tasks (individual MapReduce jobs)
is performed using this file as input data.

4. Support for commodity hardware. HDFS assumes that it runs on com-

modity hardware, which has a high probability of failure. To com-
pensate, HDFS supports a variety of data replication and recovery
protocols that prevent data loss in case of hard disk failures.

5. Standard POSIX interface. HDFS supports the standard POSIX file

system interface. This essentially means that with minor exceptions
(HDFS needs to have commands for transfer of files to/from that are
not present in regular file systems), standard UNIX/Linux file system
commands are supported on HDFS.

HDFS is not very good for dealing with

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 1. Large numbers of small files. Each file will wind up being stored in a
64MB block.

2. Multiple active writes to HDFS files. Data files on HDFS are assumed
to be static. HDFS is not very good at supporting active modification
of data files.

HDFS organization. By default, HDFS is organized in a way similar to

how Linux file system is organized. Each Hadoop user receives their own
directory:

hdfs:///user/<loginId>

or, simply

/user/<loginId>

This is the default location for all file transfers/file operations for HDFS
for user <loginId>. For example

$ hdfs dfs -ls

command that I run (as user dekhtyar), is equivalent to running

$ hdfs dfs -ls /user/dekhtyar

or

$ hdfs dfs -ls hdfs:///user/dekhtyar

Permissions. HDFS supports the standard user-group-others POSIX file

access model. By default, the group is set to supergroup and all Hadoop
users usually are its members.

Working with HDFS

Hadoop provides three command-line methods for accessing HDFS:

• hadoop fs command

• hadoop dfs command

• hdfs dfs command

hadoop dfs and hdfs dfs commands. The hadoop dfs and hdfs dfs
commands provide command-line access to HDFS and the files stored on it.
hadoop dfs command is depricated in the new version of hadoop. You
must use hdfs dsf command now.
hadoop fs command. The hadoop fs command provides interface to
any file system reachable from the node on which the command is run.
Specifically, in addition to HDFS, hadoop fs can access files from the local
file system.
Below, we use hadoop fs to represent the syntax of HDFS commands.
The syntax of the other two commands is similar.

General file system access command format. The general format of

an HDFS access command is:

$ hadoop fs -<command> [<arguments>]

Here, <command> is the file system access command, and <arguments> are
the optional arguments to each command.

File system access commands.

HDFS supports the following file system access commands. (This is not a
full list, but rather a list of most important commands.)
Command Meaning
-help help message, instructions on use of commands
-usage display information about the usage of a specific command
-ls display the lists of files/directories
-put, -copyFromLocal copy file from local file system to HDFS
-get, -copyToLocal copy file from HDFS to local file system
-moveFromLocal move file from local file system to HDFS
-moveToLocal move file from HDFS to local fils system
-mkdir create a directory
-rmdir remove a directory
-cp copy files
-mv move files
-rm delete (remove) files
-touchz create a zero length file
-chmod change file access permissions
-chgroup change file group
-chown change file owner
-cat display contents of file(s)
-text output the contents of a file as text
-tail display the last 1Kb of the file
-du show file system usage statistics
-df show free space on the file system

Viewing directory structure and files. To see what is in a specific

HDFS directory, use the -ls command.

$ hadoop fs -ls <hdfsPath>

For example

$ hadoop fs -ls test/

shows the list of files and directories in the test directory located in the
home directory of the current user.
A sample output may be:
dekhtyar@cslvm31:~/369/lab6$ hadoop fs -ls test/
Found 5 items
-rw-r--r-- 2 dekhtyar supergroup 83 2016-02-04 14:59 test/data
drwxr-xr-x - dekhtyar supergroup 0 2016-02-05 12:03 test/grep
drwxr-xr-x - dekhtyar supergroup 0 2016-02-09 17:33 test/out01
drwxr-xr-x - dekhtyar supergroup 0 2016-02-09 17:09 test/output
-rw-r--r-- 2 dekhtyar supergroup 3302 2016-02-04 20:00 test/wc.jar

HDFS supports the -ls -R flag, which recursively lists all subdirectories.

dekhtyar@cslvm31:~/369/lab6$ hadoop fs -ls -R test/

-rw-r--r-- 2 dekhtyar supergroup 83 2016-02-04 14:59 test/data
drwxr-xr-x - dekhtyar supergroup 0 2016-02-05 12:03 test/grep
-rw-r--r-- 2 dekhtyar supergroup 0 2016-02-05 12:03 test/grep/_SUCCESS
-rw-r--r-- 2 dekhtyar supergroup 7 2016-02-05 12:03 test/grep/part-r-00000
drwxr-xr-x - dekhtyar supergroup 0 2016-02-09 17:33 test/out01
-rw-r--r-- 2 dekhtyar supergroup 0 2016-02-09 17:33 test/out01/_SUCCESS
-rw-r--r-- 2 dekhtyar supergroup 114 2016-02-09 17:33 test/out01/part-r-00000
drwxr-xr-x - dekhtyar supergroup 0 2016-02-09 17:09 test/output
-rw-r--r-- 2 dekhtyar supergroup 0 2016-02-09 17:09 test/output/_SUCCESS
-rw-r--r-- 2 dekhtyar supergroup 94 2016-02-09 17:09 test/output/part-r-00000
-rw-r--r-- 2 dekhtyar supergroup 3302 2016-02-04 20:00 test/wc.jar

To view the contents of the file you can issue one of the following com-
mands:

$ hadoop fs -cat <hdfsFile>

or

$ hadoop fs -text <hdfsFile>

To view only the end of a large file, use

$ hadoop fs -tail <hdfsFile>

Copying files. To put a file (or files) onto HDFS from a local system, use
-put:

$ hadoop fs -put <localSource> <hdfsDestination>

Here, <localSource> is the file access path/pattern (can include wild-

cards) on the local system, and <hdfsDestination> is a destination (must
be a directory if <localSource> matches multiple files) on HDFS, where
the file(s) shall be uploaded.
For example,

$ hadoop fs -put data .

copies the file data from the current directory of the local filesystem to
the home directory of the current user of HDFS.
To copy a file (or files) from HDFS to a local file system use -get:

$ hadoop fs -put <hdfsSource> <localDestination>

 Here, <hdfsSource> is the file access path/pattern (can include wildcards)
on the HDFS and <localDestination> is a destination (must be a directory
if <hdfsSource> matches multiple files) on HDFS, where the file(s) shall be
uploaded.
For example,

$ hadoop fs -get test/output/part-r-00000 .

copies the file part-r-00000 residing in /user/<loginId>/test/output

directory into the current directory on the local file system.
Using -moveFromLocal instead of -put and -moveToLocal instead of -get
erases the source file/files after they have been successfully transferred to
the new destination.
hadoop fs -cp can be used to copy files within HDFS, as well as copy
files between different file systems.

$ hadoop fs -cp foo bar

copies file foo on HDFS (/user/<loginId>/foo to a new file in the same

directory named bar.

$ hadoop fs -cp file:///home/<loginId>/foo hdfs:///user/<loginId/

copies file foo from the home directory of the user <loginId> on local file
system to HDFS. The inverse can be done using the following command:

$ hadoop fs -cp hdfs:///user/<loginId>/foo file:///home/<loginId/

hadoop fs -mv works the same way, only it removes the source file after
the successful transfer.

Directory operations. Simple directory management is the same as in

Linux.
To create a new HDFS directory:

$ hadoop fs -mkdir <hdfsDirectory>

To remove an empty HDFS directory:

$ hadoop fs -rmdir <hdfsDirectory>