Hive - Permission denied when trying to start Hive with other users

Problem

I had installed Hive and the Hiver CLI work with the user who installed Hive. However, when I try to start Hive CLI with another user, it failed with

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.RuntimeException: java.lang.RuntimeException: java.io.IOException: Permission denied
    at org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.session.SessionState.start(SessionState.java:522)
    at org.apache.hadoop.hive.cli.CliDriver.run(CliDriver.java:677)
    at org.apache.hadoop.hive.cli.CliDriver.main(CliDriver.java:621)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57)
    at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
    at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:606)
    at org.apache.hadoop.util.RunJar.run(RunJar.java:221)
    at org.apache.hadoop.util.RunJar.main(RunJar.java:136)
Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: java.io.IOException: Permission denied
    at org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.session.SessionState.start(SessionState.java:515)
    ... 8 more
Caused by: java.io.IOException: Permission denied
    at java.io.UnixFileSystem.createFileExclusively(Native Method)
    at java.io.File.createTempFile(File.java:2001)
    at org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.session.SessionState.createTempFile(SessionState.java:818)
    at org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.session.SessionState.start(SessionState.java:513)

Solution

Usually, this is due to permission issue at the HIVE scratch directory (hive.exec.local.scratchdir) defined at hive-site.xml. You could use chmod to change the directory permission directly or configure hive.scratch.dir.permission at hive-site.xml to other value (default at 700)