diff --git a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
index c1e859e821..6387a940e0 100644
--- a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
@@ -386,6 +386,9 @@ Release 0.23.3 - UNRELEASED
     HADOOP-8088. User-group mapping cache incorrectly does negative caching on
     transient failures (Khiwal Lee via bobby)
 
+    HADOOP-8179. risk of NPE in CopyCommands processArguments() (Daryn Sharp
+    via bobby)
+
 Release 0.23.2 - UNRELEASED 
 
   INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES
diff --git a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/fs/shell/CopyCommands.java b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/fs/shell/CopyCommands.java
index 3d999ed54d..15155fac80 100644
--- a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/fs/shell/CopyCommands.java
+++ b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/fs/shell/CopyCommands.java
@@ -81,10 +81,9 @@ protected void processArguments(LinkedList<PathData> items)
       }
       FSDataOutputStream out = dst.fs.create(dst.path);
       try {
-        FSDataInputStream in = null;
         for (PathData src : srcs) {
+          FSDataInputStream in = src.fs.open(src.path);
           try {
-            in = src.fs.open(src.path);
             IOUtils.copyBytes(in, out, getConf(), false);
             if (delimiter != null) {
               out.write(delimiter.getBytes("UTF-8"));