Hi Danny,
Please use the following command to check the file is available or not.
- hadoop fs -ls -d /home/ec2-user/sam/

Due to restriction. You can only create folder under /user/ec2-user/.

Hope this helps.
Thanks

i am still getting this same error when i try a -ls or -mkdir. I had previously created this directory during the class sessions.

[ec2-user@ip-172-31-24-142 data]$ hadoop fs -ls -d /home/ec2-user/sam/
Warning: $HADOOP_HOME is deprecated.

/usr/hdp/2.3.2.0-2950//hadoop/bin/hadoop.distro: line 170: exec: : not found