" hadoop fs -ls " listing files in the present working directory

Question

I am following the Udacity's course on Hadoop which instructs using the command hadoop fs -ls to list files. But on my machine running Ubuntu, it instead list files in the present working directory. What am I doing wrong?

which hadoop commands gives the output: /home/usrname/hadoop-2.5.1//hadoop

Are the double slashes in the path the cause of this problem?

Answer 1

You file system must be pointing to local file system. Just modify the configuration to point it to HDFS and restart the processes.

Check this configuration:

 <property>
    <name>fs.default.name</name>
    <value>hdfs://<IP>:<Port></value>
</property>

Answer 2

You have to setup path for hadoop root folder in your current users .bashrc file something as

export HADOOP_HOME=/home/seo/hadoop/hadoop-1.2.1

then add it to your system path variable as

export PATH=$PATH:$HADOOP_HOME/bin:

And then when you use

hadoop fs -ls

will list your hdfs file system file if your hadoop cluster is up and running.