https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Support-Questions/How-to-access-file-in-HDFS-from-Spark-shell-or-app-with-Avro/m-p/157177#M119584 <P>Almost forgot about this...</P><P>I access my avro files like so:</P><P>First as Tim said, include proper avro lib, in my case DataBricks. </P><P>spark-submit --packages com.databricks:spark-avro_2.10:2.0.1 --class MyMain MyMain.jar</P><P>val df = sqlContext.read.format("com.databricks.spark.avro"). option("header", "true").load("/user/user1/writer_test.avro") df.select("time").show()</P><P>...</P><P>Thanks all</P> Tue, 20 Sep 2016 09:20:58 GMT mak88 2016-09-20T09:20:58Z