Fuse HDFS allows you use standard posix system commands with HDFS. This may be useful, for example, if you have a program that needs to use data that is stored in HDFS. 

To use Fuse HDFS, change directories to /hadoop-fuse/user/<your_uniqname>

Once in this directory, you can use commands on your HDFS files just as you would on any other files. For example, the ls command will list the contents of your HDFS home directory.

You could also run a Python or R program that uses a file in HDFS.

You can save the below file and run it as you would regularly run a python program to access an example data file we have available to all users in HDFS.

#!/usr/bin/python
f = open("/hadoop-fuse/var/examples/romeojuliet.txt", "r")
data = f.read()
f.close()
d = {}
for word in data.split(' '):
        if word in d:
                d[word] += 1
        else:
                d[word] = 1
for word, count in d.items():
        print word + str(count)

Writing Hadoop MapReduce code in Java is the lowest level way to program against a Hadoop cluster. Hadoop’s libraries do not contain any abstractions, like Spark RDDs or a Hive or Pig-like higher level language. All code must implement the MapReduce paradigm.

This video provides a great introduction to MapReduce. This documentation provides a written explanation and an example.

Hadoop consists of two components; HDFS, a filesystem built for high read speeds, and YARN, a resource manager. HDFS is not a POSIX filesystem, so normal command line tools like “cp” and “mv” will not work. Most of the common tools have been reimplemented for HDFS and can be run using the “hdfs dfs” command. All data must be in HDFS for jobs to be able to read it.

Here are a few basic commands:

# List the contents of your HDFS home directory
hdfs dfs -ls

# Copy local file data.csv to your HDFS home directory
hdfs dfs -put data.csv data.csv

# Copy HDFS file data.csv back to your local home directory
hdfs dfs -get data.csv data2.csv

A complete reference of HDFS commands can be found on the Apache website.