Cassandra dead but pid file exists

Question

I have novice to cassandra and tried my hands to install cassandra-2.1.2 on centos 7.0. After complete installation execute cqlsh command and created few keyspace(s) and column

Answer 1

From https://github.com/apache/cassandra/blob/cassandra-2.1/examples/client_only/README.txt#L43-L49 :

cassandra.yaml can be on the classpath as is done here, can be specified (by modifying the script) in a location within the classpath like this: java -Xmx1G -Dcassandra.config=/path/in/classpath/to/cassandra.yaml ... or can be retrieved from a location outside the classpath like this: ... -Dcassandra.config=file:///path/to/cassandra.yaml ... or ... -Dcassandra.config=http://awesomesauce.com/cassandra.yaml ...

So you probably had a misconfigured startup option.