How to read multiple text files into a single RDD?

You can specify whole directories, use wildcards and even CSV of directories and wildcards. E.g.:

sc.textFile("/my/dir1,/my/paths/part-00[0-5]*,/another/dir,/a/specific/file")

As Nick Chammas points out this is an exposure of Hadoop's FileInputFormat and therefore this also works with Hadoop (and Scalding).

Use union as follows:

val sc = new SparkContext(...)
val r1 = sc.textFile("xxx1")
val r2 = sc.textFile("xxx2")
...
val rdds = Seq(r1, r2, ...)
val bigRdd = sc.union(rdds)

Then the bigRdd is the RDD with all files.

You can use a single textFile call to read multiple files. Scala:

sc.textFile(','.join(files))

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