Here is the actual fix (it's actually quite loony):  don't wrap the name of the file in the REGISTER statement with single quotes.  That's it. Catastrophic problems here: 1) Obviously not backwards compatible. 2) If this is a problem, why not just indicate that a) the format is wrong, or b) that a path that started with a single-quote did not yield a valid python file or c) anything understandable instead of getting in the middle of the M/R computation and throwing wacky (mkey?  nullPointer) errors. ... View more