[jira] [Created] (HADOOP-9972) new APIs for listStatus and globStatus to deal with symlinks

["Colin Patrick McCabe (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Colin Patrick McCabe created HADOOP-9972:
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             Summary: new APIs for listStatus and globStatus to deal with symlinks
                 Key: HADOOP-9972
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-9972
             Project: Hadoop Common
          Issue Type: Improvement
            Reporter: Colin Patrick McCabe
            Assignee: Colin Patrick McCabe


Based on the discussion in HADOOP-9912, we need new APIs for FileSystem to deal with symlinks.  The issue is that code has been written which is incompatible with the existence of things which are not files or directories.  For example,
there is a lot of code out there that looks at FileStatus#isFile, and
if it returns false, assumes that what it is looking at is a
directory.  In the case of a symlink, this assumption is incorrect.

It seems reasonable to make the default behavior of {{FileSystem#listStatus}} and {{FileSystem#globStatus}} be fully resolving symlinks, and ignoring dangling ones.  This will prevent incompatibility with existing MR jobs and other HDFS users.  We should also add new versions of listStatus and globStatus that allow new, symlink-aware code to deal with symlinks as symlinks.

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