Why does “hadoop fs -mkdir” fail with Permission Denied?

Question

I am using Cloudera on a VM machine that I am playing around with. Unfortunately I am having issues copying data to the HDFS, I am getting the following:

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Answer 1

Using mkdir in hadoop needs the "hadoop file permissions". From your example you can see that hdfs is a user that has permissions to create folders. So if you run:

sudo -u hdfs hadoop fs -mkdir /import

then the import folder will be created. If you want to change the owner of this folder run:

sudo -u hdfs hadoop fs -chown new_user /import

Now the new_user can manipulate files inside the import folder