Hadoop files system commands

The following are some of the common commands understood by Hadoop HDFS

-cat
-chgrp -R GROUP PATH...
-chmod -R PATH...
-chown -R OWNER:GROUP PATH...
-copyFromLocal ...
-copyToLocal -ignoreCrc -crc
-count-q
-cp
-du
-dus
-expunge
-get -ignoreCrc -crc
-getmerge addnl
-help cmd
-ls
-lsr
-mkdir
-moveFromLocal ...
-moveToLocal -crc
-mv
-put ...
-rm
-rmr
-setrep -R -w
-stat format
-tail -f
-test -ezd
-text
-touchz

Suppose you want to read see contents of a directory, run command (note: hadoop is alias of the hadoop executable)
hadoop fs -ls