Hadoop provides you with the Java API that you can use to perform some of the commonly used file operations such as read, create a new file or append at the end of the existing file or search for files. I wanted to try these common operartions out so i built this HelloHDFS project, that you can download from here This is the main class that takes command line argument for operation name and file path and performs the operation. After downloading the source code for the project you can use following maven command to build a single jar that also contains all the dependencies in it.

mvn clean compile assembly:single

Once your jar is ready you can use it like this for reading file from hdfs with relative path

java -jar target/HelloHDFS-jar-with-dependencies.jar read aesop.txt

or fully qualified path

java -jar target/HelloHDFS-jar-with-dependencies.jar read hdfs://localhost/user/user/aesop.txt