Often this happens as there is a "hidden" character at the end of the file or folder name. For example a line break (\n, \r, etc).   If you list the files you can get a clue that is the case as usually the output will look strange with an extra line or something there.   You can try running a few commands like the following to see if it matches a file: hdfs dfs -ls $'/path/to/folder\r' hdfs dfs -ls $'/path/to/folder\n' hdfs dfs -ls $'/path/to/folder\r\n'   If any of those match, then you can delete the incorrect one with a similar command. If you get no luck with that, then pipe the ls output into "od -c" and it will show the special characters hdfs dfs -ls /path/to/folder | od -c ... View more