deleting an iterator in accumulo

I learnt the hard way that setting an iterator in the accumulo shell sets it for a table permanently. To make matters worse, I set this iterator in the metadata table and made everything fail.

Removing the iterator was tricky. First I had to find what accumulo decided to call the iterator as I did not specify a name but just the java class:

Here was the command I used:

setiter -class org.apache.accumulo.core.iterators.FirstEntryInRowIterator -p 99 -scan

Here is how I found what the iterators for accumulo.metadata table were called:

config -t accumulo.metadata -f iterator


SCOPE      | NAME                                                  | VALUE


table      | table.iterator.majc.bulkLoadFilter .................. | 20,org.apache.accumulo.server.iterators.MetadataBulkLoadFilter

table      | table.iterator.majc.vers ............................ | 10,org.apache.accumulo.core.iterators.user.VersioningIterator

table      | table.iterator.majc.vers.opt.maxVersions ............ | 1

table      | table.iterator.minc.vers ............................ | 10,org.apache.accumulo.core.iterators.user.VersioningIterator

table      | table.iterator.minc.vers.opt.maxVersions ............ | 1

table      | table.iterator.scan.firstEntry ...................... | 99,org.apache.accumulo.core.iterators.FirstEntryInRowIterator

table      | table.iterator.scan.firstEntry.opt.scansBeforeSeek .. | 10

table      | table.iterator.scan.vers ............................ | 10,org.apache.accumulo.core.iterators.user.VersioningIterator

table      | table.iterator.scan.vers.opt.maxVersions ............ | 1

The iterator I added seemed to be named "table.iterator.scan.firstEntry", so I tried to delete that:
root@work accumulo.metadata> deleteiter -n table.iterator.scan.firstEntry -t accumulo.metadata

2014-12-20 15:13:42,854 [shell.Shell] WARN : no iterators found that match your criteria

You have to specify just the last part of the iterator name:
root@work accumulo.metadata> deleteiter -scan -n firstEntry -t accumulo.metadata