[jira] Commented: (HADOOP-2025) Instantiating a FileSystem object should guarantee the existence of the working directory

["Doug Cutting (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-2025?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#action_12533892 ] 

Doug Cutting commented on HADOOP-2025:
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Maybe it should attempt to create '/user/<username>/' before it starts using '/'?  I worry about '/' getting polluted on shared filesystems each time a new user comes online.

> Instantiating a FileSystem object should guarantee the existence of the working directory
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: HADOOP-2025
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-2025
>             Project: Hadoop
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: fs
>    Affects Versions: 0.14.1
>            Reporter: Sameer Paranjpye
>             Fix For: 0.16.0
>
>
> Issues like HADOOP-1891 and HADOOP-1916 illustrate the need for this behavior.
> In HADOOP-1916 the problem is that the default working directory for a user on HDFS '/user/<username>' does not exist. This results in the command 'hadoop dfs -copyFromLocal foo ." creating a *file* called /user/<username> and copying the contents of the file 'foo' into this file.
> HADOOP-1891 is basically the same problem. The problem that Olga observed was that copying a file to '.' on HDFS when her 'home directory' did not exist resulted in the creation of a file with the path as her home directory. The problem is incorrectly filed as a bug in the Path class. The behavior of Path is correct, as Doug points out, it is perfectly reasonable for Path(".") to convert to an empty path. When this empty path is resolved in HDFS or any other filesystem the resolution to '/user/<username>' is also correct (at least for HDFS). The problem IMO is that the existence of the working directory is not guaranteed.
> When I log in to a machine my default working directory is '/home/sameerp' and filesystem operations that I execute with relative paths all work correctly because this directory exists. My home directory lives on a filer, in the event of it being unmountable the default working directory I get is '/' which also is guaranteed to exist.
> In the context of Hadoop, instantiating a FileSystem object is the analogue of logging in and should result in a working directory whose existence has been validated. In the case of HDFS this should be '/user/<username>' or '/' if the directory does not exist.

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