What does 'insert overwrite local directory' mean in Hive?

Question

Im having some issues understanding what does the following type of query do:

insert overwrite local directory $directorey_name$ select $some_query$

What does this mean, and what are the side effects of this?

Answer 1

Export the query results into a file on the local file system

insert overwrite local directory '/tmp/hello'
row format delimited
fields terminated by '|'
select 1,2,3,'Hello','world'
;

---

! ls /tmp/hello;

000000_0

! cat /tmp/hello/000000_0;

1|2|3|Hello|world