To enable ACL's on HDFS, we need to have the below on the hdfs-site.xml

<property> <name>dfs.namenode.acls.enabled</name> <value>true</value> </property>

-rw-r----- 3 bruce sales 0 2014-03-04 16:31 /sales-data The above hdfs ls represents that bruce is the owner of the folder/file and the group sales has read permission.

Grant access to another group apart from "sales" Set the ACL.

Ref: HDFS Hortonworks Blog