Difference between hadoop fs -put and hadoop fs -copyFromLocal

Question

-put and -copyFromLocal are documented as identical, while most examples use the verbose variant -copyFromLocal. Why?

Same thing for

Answer 1

Despite what is claimed by the documentation, as of now (Oct. 2015), both -copyFromLocal and -put are the same.

From the online help:

[cloudera@quickstart ~]$ hdfs dfs -help copyFromLocal 
-copyFromLocal [-f] [-p] [-l]  ...  :
  Identical to the -put command.

And this is confirmed by looking at the sources, where you can see that the CopyFromLocal class extends the Put class, but without adding any new behavior:

  public static class CopyFromLocal extends Put {
    public static final String NAME = "copyFromLocal";
    public static final String USAGE = Put.USAGE;
    public static final String DESCRIPTION = "Identical to the -put command.";
  }

  public static class CopyToLocal extends Get {
    public static final String NAME = "copyToLocal";
    public static final String USAGE = Get.USAGE;
    public static final String DESCRIPTION = "Identical to the -get command.";
  }

As you might notice it, this is exactly the same for get/copyToLocal.