Why spark-shell fails with NullPointerException?

Question

I try to execute spark-shell on Windows 10, but I keep getting this error every time I run it.

I used both latest and spark-1.5.0-bin-hadoop2.4 versions

Answer 1

My issue was having other .exe's/Jars inside the winutils/bin folder. So I cleared all the others and was left with winutils.exe alone. Was using spark 2.1.1