How to kill a scan operation in hbase shell without Ctrl-C

Question

Sometimes when I run a scan '<tablename>. I see a continuous flood of data being printed because the table is big. I want to kill the process that print the data. Is there a way to do it other than Ctrl-C? because Ctrl-C kills the shell process and I don't want to exit the shell.

Breastfeed

Answer 1

You could use scan with LIMIT to limit the scan output on shell :

scan 'table', LIMIT => 5

This will show you only 5 rows. You could also press ctlr+s to hold the scan, if you have done a full scan and want to hold on at a specific row.

Desirable

This is not really an answer to the question as asked though. In the case where you issue a 'scan' command and accidentally forget it will return thousands/millions of rows, is there a solution to interrupt it or not? – Haukom

@smci, Why does an asterisk sign show at the end of the hbase shell prompt Instead of > after typing a command ending as ';'? How do I fix the prompt ending with an asterisk sign without exit hbase shell? – Gottlieb

@Haukom Thanks. Somebody told me using ctrl+d can stop an incomplete command. It works. – Gottlieb

@JuliaChang: that's good to know, presumably with current version, because when I used hbase several years ago it didn't. – Haukom