With SVN 'At revision 1152597.', and freshly rebuilt: jar -tvf /Users/danbri/Documents/workspace/trunk/examples/target/mahout-examples-0.6-SNAPSHOT-job.jar | grep -i license
19355 Sat Feb 26 19:16:30 CET 2011 META-INF/LICENSE.txt 11358 Sun Apr 11 21:45:12 CEST 2010 META-INF/LICENSE 1596 Mon Dec 20 15:47:30 CET 2010 LICENSE 0 Sun Dec 01 11:57:24 CET 2002 license/ 4083 Sun Dec 01 11:57:24 CET 2002 license/LICENSE.dom-documentation.txt 3595 Sun Dec 01 11:57:24 CET 2002 license/LICENSE.dom-software.txt 804 Sun Dec 01 11:57:24 CET 2002 license/LICENSE.sax.txt 2827 Sun Dec 01 11:57:24 CET 2002 license/LICENSE.txt 1274 Sun Dec 01 11:57:24 CET 2002 license/README.dom.txt 715 Sun Dec 01 11:57:24 CET 2002 license/README.sax.txt 672 Sun Dec 01 11:57:24 CET 2002 license/README.txt This situation seems to quite confuse Hadoop. The underlying OSX filesystem doesn't support file and directory names differing only by case; see http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Java/Conceptual/Java14Development/01-JavaOverview/JavaOverview.html mahout lucene.vector --dir solr/data/index/ --output bar/vecs --field label --idField id --dictOut bar/dict.out --norm 2 Running on hadoop, using HADOOP_HOME=/Users/danbri/working/hadoop/hadoop-0.20.2 HADOOP_CONF_DIR=/Users/danbri/working/hadoop/hadoop-0.20.2/conf MAHOUT-JOB: /Users/danbri/Documents/workspace/trunk/examples/target/mahout-examples-0.6-SNAPSHOT-job.jar Exception in thread "main" java.io.IOException: Mkdirs failed to create /tmp/hadoop/hadoop-unjar5018665014541152120/license at org.apache.hadoop.util.RunJar.unJar(RunJar.java:48) at org.apache.hadoop.util.RunJar.main(RunJar.java:136) That Hadoop error message is somewhat unhelpful, especially for those who doubt their hadoop knowhow; but technically correct. The /tmp/hadoop and its subdirectory exist and are writeable. The problem is the specific file/dir names being written into it. That wasn't so obvious. So I went chasing around configuring hadoop tmp dirs, checking it existed and was writable in local and in hdfs dirs, ... then ... I finally, belatedly tried unzipping the jar with 'jar -xvf ' to see what was special about 'license', and got the same error from commandline 'jar' that upset !file.getParentFile().isDirectory() in Hadoop's ./src/core/org/apache/hadoop/util/RunJar.java: java.io.IOException: license : could not create directory at sun.tools.jar.Main.extractFile(Main.java:909) at sun.tools.jar.Main.extract(Main.java:852) at sun.tools.jar.Main.run(Main.java:242) at sun.tools.jar.Main.main(Main.java:1149) (this is the same error that trips up hadoop) This seems to be reproducible; I did an svn up, mvn clean and mvn package, let all the tests run and pass, and confirm that the same thing happens. I compared an early job .jar from 0.5, where all was fine. Any suggestions for best quick fix? cheers, Dan ps. java -version java version "1.6.0_26" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_26-b03-384-10M3425) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.1-b02-384, mixed mode)