[HADOOP-4368] Superuser privileges required to do "df"

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 0.18.1
• Fix Version/s: 0.21.0
• Hadoop Flags: Reviewed
• Release Note: New filesystem shell command -df reports capacity, space used and space free. Any user may execute this command without special privileges.
• Assignee: Craig Macdonald
• Reporter: Brian Bockelman
• Created: 07/Oct/08 23:23
• Updated: 24/Aug/10 20:34
• Resolved: 02/Feb/09 19:27

Description

super user privileges are required in DFS in order to get the file system statistics (FSNamesystem.java, getStats method). This means that when HDFS is mounted via fuse-dfs as a non-root user, "df" is going to return 16exabytes total and 0 free instead of the correct amount.

As far as I can tell, there's no need to require super user privileges to see the file system size (and historically in Unix, this is not required).

To fix this, simply comment out the privilege check in the getStats method.

Issue Links

• is related to: HADOOP-2659 The commands in DFSAdmin should require admin privilege