HDFS does not properly check permissions of files in a directory when doing rmr -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Key: HDFS-1495 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HDFS-1495 Project: Hadoop HDFS Issue Type: Bug Affects Versions: 0.20.2 Reporter: Alan Gates In POSIX file semantics, the ability to remove an entry a file is determined by whether the user has write permissions on the directory containing the file. However, to delete recursively (rm -r) the user must have write permissions in all directories being removed. Thus if you have a directory structure like /a/b/c and a user has write permissions on a but not on b, then he is not allowed to do 'rm -r b'. This is because he does not have permissions to remove c, so the rm of b fails, even though he has permission to remove b. However, 'hadoop fs -rmr b' removes both b and c in this case. It should instead fail and return an error message saying the user does not have permission to remove c. 'hadoop fs -rmr c' correctly fails. -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. - You can reply to this email to add a comment to the issue online.