Hadoop WordCount Example

WordCount example reads text files and counts how often words occur. The input is text files and the output is text files, each line of which contains a word and the count of how often it occured, separated by a tab.

Each mapper takes a line as input and breaks it into words. It then emits a key/value pair of the word and 1. Each reducer sums the counts for each word and emits a single key/value with the word and sum.

As an optimization, the reducer is also used as a combiner on the map outputs. This reduces the amount of data sent across the network by combining each word into a single record.

To run the example, the command syntax is bin/hadoop jar hadoop-*-examples.jar wordcount [-m <#maps>] [-r <#reducers>]

All of the files in the input directory (called in-dir in the command line above) are read and the counts of words in the input are written to the output directory (called out-dir above). It is assumed that both inputs and outputs are stored in HDFS. If your input is not already in HDFS, but is rather in a local file system somewhere, you need to copy the data into HDFS using a command like this:

bin/hadoop dfs -mkdir bin/hadoop dfs -copyFromLocal