 <p>Your first call to <code>hadoop fs -ls</code> is a relative directory listing, for the current user typically rooted in a directory called <code>/user/${user.name}</code> in HDFS. So your <code>hadoop fs -ls</code> command is listing files / directories relative to this location - in your case <code>/user/Li/</code></p> <p>You should be able to assert this by running a aboolute listing and confirm the contents / output match: <code>hadoop fs -ls /user/Li/</code></p> <p>As these files are in HDFS, you will not be able to find them on the local filesystem - they are distributed across your cluster nodes as blocks (for real files), and metadata entries (for files and directories) in the NameNode.</p>