---
layout: topic
category-page: fs
title: Filesystem
author: Filesystem team
---
<!-- Description by Ricardo Vivanco -->
<p class="description-section">The File System (FS) shell includes various shell-like commands that directly interact with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) as well as other file systems that Hadoop supports, such as Local FS, HFTP FS, S3 FS, and others. The FS shell is invoked by:

bin/hadoop fs 
All FS shell commands take path URIs as arguments. The URI format is scheme://authority/path. For HDFS the scheme is hdfs, and for the Local FS the scheme is file. The scheme and authority are optional. If not specified, the default scheme specified in the configuration is used. An HDFS file or directory such as /parent/child can be specified as hdfs://namenodehost/parent/child or simply as /parent/child (given that your configuration is set to point to hdfs://namenodehost).

Most of the commands in FS shell behave like corresponding Unix commands. Differences are described with each of the commands. Error information is sent to stderr and the output is sent to stdout.</p>