how to change the task status into failed in hadoop mapreduce on exception

Use the JobClient to access the RunningJob class ( I have 1.0.4 API).

So the code looks like this:

Have a JobClient and a RunningJobreference in your setup().

The method is as follows:

public void setup(Context context){    JobClient jobClient;    RunningJob runningJob;    try     {        jobClient = new JobClient((JobConf)context.getConfiguration());        runningJob = jobClient.getJob((JobID)(context.getJobId()); //mapred.JobID!    }    catch (IOException e)    {        System.out.println("IO Exception");    }    try    {        System.out.println(propertyName);        session = FindPath.createSession("localhost",3250, EncodingConstants.en_ISO_8859_1);        session.open();    }    catch     {        System.out.println("error");        runningJob.killTask((TaskAttemptID)context.getTaskAttemptID(), true);// cast as mapred.TaskAttemptID    }}

This causes the TaskAttempt to fail.

Finally, you should probably set mapred.map.max.attempts to 1 so that a failed taskAttempt is a failed task.

Note:

You should consider altering mapred.max.map.failures.percent as it reflects the tolerance of your cluster towards failed tasks.