NullPointerException in sstabledump

sstabledump can fail with NullPointerException, when not all files are present on Disk. This behavior is frequently present on Cassandra nodes with a high write-throughput and much disk I/O. It looks like Cassandra writes the Data file fast, and the other files (Statistics, ...) later when it has time to do so. This can be even a minute later. Technically it is OK for the Cassandra DB itself, but the sstabledump tool does not handle this gracefully.

Current behavior:

• NullPointerException (see below)

Expected behavior:

• More graceful behavior, e.g. a message to STDERR

PS: This is minor priority, I may pick up the ticket myself if nobody else is faster.

~/apache-cassandra-3.9/tools/bin/sstabledump /appdata/mc-53346-big-Data.db
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
        at org.apache.cassandra.utils.FBUtilities.newPartitioner(FBUtilities.java:429)
        at org.apache.cassandra.tools.SSTableExport.metadataFromSSTable(SSTableExport.java:104)
        at org.apache.cassandra.tools.SSTableExport.main(SSTableExport.java:180)

FBUtilities.java:429 is the following line, and validationMetadata == null:

if (validationMetadata.partitioner.endsWith("LocalPartitioner"))