Is there a way to see the contents of an orc file that hive 0.11 and above use. I usually cat gz files and decompress them to see the contents eg: cat part-0000.gz | pigz -d | more Note: pigz is a parallel gz program.
I would like to know if there is something similar to this for orc files.
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Updated answer in year 2020:
Per @Owen's answer, ORC has grown up and matured as it's own Apache project. A completed list of ORC Adopters shows how prevalent it is now supported across many varieties of Big Data technologies.
Credit to @Owen and the ORC Apache project team, ORC's project site has a fully maintained up-to-date documentation on using either the Java or C++ stand alone tool on ORC file stored on a Linux local file system. Which carried on the torch for the original Hive+ORC Apache wiki page.
Original answer dated: May 30 '14 at 16:27
The ORC file dump utility comes with hive (0.11 or higher):
hive --orcfiledump <hdfs-location-of-orc-file>
