How to delete/truncate tables from Hadoop-Hive?

To Truncate:

hive -e "TRUNCATE TABLE IF EXISTS $tablename"

To Drop:

hive -e "Drop TABLE IF EXISTS $tablename"

You can use drop command to delete meta data and actual data from HDFS.

And just to delete data and keep the table structure, use truncate command.

For further help regarding hive ql, check language manual of hive.

Use the following to delete all the tables in a linux environment.

hive -e 'show tables' | xargs -I '{}' hive -e 'drop table {}'

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