A script that deletes all tables in Hbase

Question

I can tell hbase to disable and delete particular tables using:

disable 'tablename'
delete 'tablename'

But I want to delete all the tables in the database without hardcoding the names of any of the tables. Is there a way to do this? I want to do this through the command-line utility ./hbase shell, not through Java or Thrift.

Answer 1

You can pipe commands to the bin/hbase shell command. From there you can use some scripting to grab the table names and pipe the disable/delete commands back to hbase.

i.e.

echo "list" | bin/hbase shell | ./filter_table_names.pl > table_names.txt
./turn_table_names_into_disable_delete_commands.pl table_names.txt | bin/hbase shell