Many thanks for following up! I do think the directory-or-file can be checked for before traversal, or at least the error message may be improved, for which I've filed https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HDFS-5802. The shell utils handle this in a clearer way btw: ➜ ~ ls foo/file ls: foo/file: Not a directory ➜ ~ hadoop fs -ls foo/file ls: `foobar/file': No such file or directory ... View more