I'm curious what you use this function for. HDFS is designed for reading and writing a lot of data at once. If I recall correctly, any time you open a pail for writing, it creates a new file. HDFS performance degrades rapidly when you have lots of small files. I'm afraid that this function would invite people to use HDFS in a way that doesn't scale, but if there's a legitimate use case for it, I'd be okay with keeping it and adding a warning to the documentation.