A pig user brought to my attention that PIG_OPTS are not being picked up but "pig -Dfoo=bar script.pig" works. I dug a little into it and found that in the case when an external hadoop (not bundled with pig) is used we rely on bin/hadoop script for starting up pig. In the process we pass PIG_OPTS as HADOOP_OPTS to the hadoop script.
bin/hadoop in turn picks up HADOOP_OPTS from HADOOP_HOME/conf/hadoop-env.sh. It might be possible a user completely resets HADOOP_OPTS here and PIG_OPTS is cleared. # Extra Java runtime options. Empty by default. export HADOOP_OPTS="-server" This will be noticeable since Pig 0.9.1 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PIG-2239 Users need to be aware of this and make sure they do not reset HADOOP_OPTS. Instead this will work # Extra Java runtime options. Empty by default. export HADOOP_OPTS="-server $HADOOP_OPTS" Thought it would be useful info if this ever comes up. -Prashant
