view contents of file in hdfs hadoop

I believe hadoop fs -cat <file> should do the job.

If the file size is huge (which will be the case most of the times), by doing 'cat' you don't want to blow up your terminal by throwing the entire content of your file. Instead, use piping and get only few lines of the file.

To get the first 10 lines of the file, hadoop fs -cat 'file path' | head -10

To get the last 5 lines of the file, hadoop fs -cat 'file path' | tail -5