So... time to eat some crow. I had a customer who is automating the their user onboarding process for his Hadoop cluster and wanted to know if he could use a linux account besides hdfs
to create a HDFS user home directory and set the appropriate permissions (see "Creating a New HDFS User" in my Hadoop Cheat Sheet). I told him he was out of luck and that was just the way it was going to be.
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