Thank you very much, Paco and Jason. It works!
For any users who may be curious what this may look like in code, here is a
small snippet of mine:
file: myLittleMRProgram.java
package.org.apache.hadoop.examples;
public static class Reduce extends MapReduceBase implements ReducerText,
Hello,
My M/R program is going smoothly, except for one small problem. I have a
global variable that is set by the user (and thus in the main function),
that I want one of my reduce functions to access. This is a read-only
variable. After some reading in the forums, I tried something like this:
Since the map reduce tasks generally run in a separate java virtual
machine and on distinct machines from your main task's java virtual
machine, there is no sharing of variables between the main task and the
map or reduce tasks.
The standard way is to store the variable in the Configuration
