What is the difference between hadoop-1 2 1 bin tar gz and hadoop-1 2 1 tar gz files

Question

When i am installing hadoop in my machine i find out there are two stable files preset in apache hadoop website. First one is hadoop-1.2.1.bin.tar.gz and second one is hadoop-1.2.1.tar.gz. So basically what is the difference of two files. My guess is hadoop-1.2.1.bin.tar.gz file is used as source code of hadoop and hadoop-1.2.1.tar.gz is contains all HDFS application.

Answer 1

As the name of the file in them self suggest:

hadoop-1.2.1.bin.tar.gz -- This contains the Binary or executables (In later releases of hadoop, this is not included for download and need to be built locally using maven)

hadoop-1.2.1.tar.gz -- This contains your src code which is distributed for your reference.

The latest stable release is 2.5.2, it is highly recommended to use the latest release.