The first thing to do after downloading and extracting Hadoop is to set JAVA_HOME in the $HADOOP_HOME/conf/hadoop-env.sh file. Almost all documentation on Hadoop site expects the above configuration but I guess that was for version 0.20. When I downloaded Hadoop 0.23 today and looked for the hadoop-env.sh file, I could not find it anywhere in the extracted archive.

After a bit of Googling I realized that things have changed in 0.23 version and now I will have to look for the file in the $HADOOP_HOME/etc/hadoop directory instead. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the file there either.

As a last resort I created a file named hadoop-env.sh in the $HADOOP_HOME/etc/hadoop directory and set my JAVA_HOME there. The one and only line in that file is given below. Fortunately after that addition, the hadoop command started working and everything went normal again.

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/