Why not have the HDFS client do the hard work by using the -C
flag instead of relying on awk or python to print the specific columns of interest?
i.e. Popen(['hdfs', 'dfs', '-ls', '-C', dirname])
Afterwards, split the output on new lines and then you will have your list of paths.
Here's an example along with logging and error handling (including for when the directory/file doesn't exist):
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
import logging
logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
FAILED_TO_LIST_DIRECTORY_MSG = 'No such file or directory'
class HdfsException(Exception):
pass
def hdfs_ls(dirname):
"""Returns list of HDFS directory entries."""
logger.info('Listing HDFS directory ' + dirname)
proc = Popen(['hdfs', 'dfs', '-ls', '-C', dirname], stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
(out, err) = proc.communicate()
if out:
logger.debug('stdout:\n' + out)
if proc.returncode != 0:
errmsg = 'Failed to list HDFS directory "' + dirname + '", return code ' + str(proc.returncode)
logger.error(errmsg)
logger.error(err)
if not FAILED_TO_LIST_DIRECTORY_MSG in err:
raise HdfsException(errmsg)
return []
elif err:
logger.debug('stderr:\n' + err)
return out.splitlines()