".." for ls does not check for existence of its parent directory.

• Key: HADOOP-1858
• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Resolution: Invalid
• Priority: Minor
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Raghu Angadi

Description

'bin/hadoop -ls /user/nonexistent/..' lists /user even if /user/nonexistent directory does not exist.

Comments

[Chris Douglas]

It's not clear this is the wrong behavior. The path normalization in java.net.URI follows RFC2396, so the collapse of dot-segments is part of every Path's construction, prior to its interaction with a FileSystem. This seems like a POSIX/URI inconsistency, not necessarily a bug. Further, checking each parent URI for every relative path is relatively expensive in HDFS, so rewriting that section of the URI RFC doesn't seem like a good solution, either.

Is this causing problems somewhere?

[Raghu Angadi]

I agree. I don't think it is really a bug either. It did not cause any particular problem.

From the shell, currently there does not seem to be a way to find if a particular directory exists. In that context, I tried if listing '..' might fail and indicate that such a directory does not exists.

[Chris Douglas]

bin/hadoop dfs -stat <path> can check for a particular directory... but I'm not sure I follow your example.

I think we can close this.