title: HBase (Easy): How to Perform Range Prefix Scan in hbase shell
body: <p>I am designing an app to run on hbase and want to interactively explore the contents of my cluster.  I am in the hbase shell and I want to perform a scan of all keys starting with the chars "abc".  Such keys might inlcude "abc4", "abc92", "abc20014" etc...  I tried a scan</p>
  
  <pre><code>hbase(main):003:0&gt; scan 'mytable', {STARTROW =&gt; 'abc', ENDROW =&gt; 'abc'}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But this does not seem to return anything since there is technically no rowkey "abc" only rowkeys starting with "abc"</p>
  
  <p>What I want is something like</p>
  
  <pre><code>hbase(main):003:0&gt; scan 'mytable', {STARTSROWPREFIX =&gt; 'abc', ENDROWPREFIX =&gt; 'abc'}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I hear HBase can do this quickly and is one of its main selling points.  How do I do this in the hbase shell?</p>