I got this error when writing a Sequence File reader / writer class in Java. The code worked in Eclipse, but not on the command line. This causes me concern, because I was very careful to set up the POM correctly. In any event, initial research on the internet indicated that the problem was a classpath issue. I tried without success to resolve the issue.

This instructions in this post were able to get me past the issue;
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17265002/hadoop-no-filesystem-for-scheme-file

The explanation made sense to me.

Configuration conf = new Configuration();
conf.set("fs.hdfs.impl", org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.DistributedFileSystem.class.getName());
conf.set("fs.file.impl", org.apache.hadoop.fs.LocalFileSystem.class.getName());