Apache Pig permissions issue

Question

I'm attempting to get Apache Pig up and running on my Hadoop cluster, and am encountering a permissions problem. Pig itself is launching and connecting to the cluster just fine- from within the Pig shell, I can ls through and around my HDFS directories. However, when I try and actually load data and run Pig commands, I run into permissions-related errors:

grunt> A = load 'all_annotated.txt' USING PigStorage() AS (id:long, text:chararray, lang:chararray);
grunt> DUMP A;
2011-08-24 18:11:40,961 [main] ERROR org.apache.pig.tools.grunt.Grunt - You don't have permission to perform the operation. Error from the server: org.apache.hadoop.security.AccessControlException: Permission denied: user=steven, access=WRITE, inode="":hadoop:supergroup:r-xr-xr-x
2011-08-24 18:11:40,977 [main] ERROR org.apache.pig.tools.grunt.Grunt - ERROR 1066: Unable to open iterator for alias A
Details at logfile: /Users/steven/Desktop/Hacking/hadoop/pig/pig-0.9.0/pig_1314230681326.log
grunt> 

In this case, all_annotated.txt is a file in my HDFS home directory that I created, and most definitely have permissions to; the same problem occurs no matter what file I try to load. However, I don't think that's the problem, as the error itself indicates Pig is trying to write somewhere. Googling around, I found a few mailing list posts suggesting that certain Pig Latin statements (order, etc.) need write access to a temporary directory on the HDFS file system whose location is controlled by the hadoop.tmp.dir property in hdfsd-site.xml. I don't think load falls into that category, but just to be sure, I changed hadoop.tmp.dir to point to a directory within my HDFS home directory, and the problem persisted.

So, anybody out there have any ideas as to what might be going on?

Answer 1

Probably your pig.temp.dir setting. It defaults to /tmp on hdfs. Pig will write temporary result there. If you don't have permission to /tmp, Pig will complain. Try to override it by -Dpig.temp.dir.