[HADOOP-16140] hadoop fs expunge to add -immediate option to purge trash immediately

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 3.3.0
• Fix Version/s: 3.2.1, 3.1.4
• Component/s: fs
• Assignee: Stephen O'Donnell
• Reporter: Stephen O'Donnell
• Created: 11/Jan/19 17:23
• Updated: 01/Oct/19 23:30
• Resolved: 05/Mar/19 14:12

Description

I have always felt the HDFS trash is missing a simple way to empty the current users trash immediately. We have "expunge" but in my experience supporting clusters, end users find this confusing. When most end users run expunge, they really want to empty their trash immediately and get confused when expunge does not do this.

This can result in users performing somewhat dangerous "skipTrash" operations on the trash to free up space. The alternative, which most users will not figure out on their own is:

1. Run the expunge command once - this will move the current folder to a checkpoint and remove any old checkpoints older than the retention interval
2. Wait over 1 minute and then run expunge again, overriding fs.trash.interval to 1 minute using the following command hadoop fs -Dfs.trash.interval=1 -expunge.

With this Jira I am proposing to add a extra command, "hdfs dfs -emptyTrash" that purges everything in the logged in users Trash directories immediately.

How would the community feel about adding this new option? I will upload a patch for comments.

Issue Links

• is depended upon by: HADOOP-13656 fs -expunge to take a filesystem
• is related to: HADOOP-12374 Description of hdfs expunge command is confusing