[jira] Created: (HDFS-1475) Want a -d flag in hadoop dfs -ls : Do not expand directories

["Greg Connor (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Want a -d flag in hadoop dfs -ls : Do not expand directories
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                 Key: HDFS-1475
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HDFS-1475
             Project: Hadoop HDFS
          Issue Type: Improvement
          Components: hdfs client
    Affects Versions: 0.20.1
         Environment: any
            Reporter: Greg Connor
            Priority: Minor


I would really love it if dfs -ls had a -d flag, like unix ls -d, which would list the directories matching the name or pattern but *not* their contents.

Current behavior is to expand every matching dir and list its contents, which is awkward if I just want to see the matching dirs themselves (and their permissions).  Worse, if a directory exists but is empty, -ls simply returns no output at all, which is unhelpful.  

So far we have used some ugly workarounds to this in various scripts, such as
  -ls /path/to |grep dir   # wasteful, and problematic if "dir" is a substring of the path
  -stat /path/to/dir "Exists"  # stat has no way to get back the full path, sadly
  -count /path/to/dir  # works but is probably overkill.

Really there is no reliable replacement for ls -d -- the above hacks will work but only for certain isolated contexts.  (I'm not a java programmer, or else I would probably submit a patch for this, or make my own jar file to do this since I need it a lot.)

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