[HDFS-4019] FSShell should support creating symlinks

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Patch Available
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 2.0.3-alpha
• Component/s: tools
• Labels: BB2015-05-TBR
• Target Version/s: 2.0.3-alpha
• Assignee: Colin McCabe
• Reporter: Colin McCabe
• Created: 08/Oct/12 18:52
• Updated: 06/May/15 03:33

Description

FSShell should support creating symlinks. This would allow users to create symlinks from the shell without having to write a Java program.

One thing that makes this complicated is that FSShell currently uses FileSystem internally, and symlinks are currently only supported by the FileContext API. So either FSShell would have to be ported to FileContext, or symlinks would have to be added to FileSystem. Or perhaps we could open a FileContext only when symlinks were necessary, but that seems messy.

Issue Links

• is blocked by: HADOOP-9817 FileSystem#globStatus and FileContext#globStatus need to work with symlinks
• is blocked by: HADOOP-7905 Port FileContext symlinks to FileSystem
• is duplicated by: HDFS-5044 dfs -ls should show the character which means symlink and link target
• is related to: HDFS-1788 FsShell ls: Show symlinks properties
• is related to: HADOOP-6424 Port FsShell to FileContext