I have a partition for a Hive table created wrongly. See the query below. Hive uses URL-encoded values for special characters.

$ hive -e 'show partitions mytable'
date=$%7Bhiveconf%3AINPUT_DATE}

How to drop it?

It will not work if you use the same value displayed above to drop it, even if Hive says OK.

hive> alter table mytable drop partition (date='$%7Bhiveconf%3AINPUT_DATE}');
OK
Time taken: 0.804 seconds

You know the actual partition when you created. If don’t remember check here to know what is the equivalent value for each encoded character value, and use the actual value to drop it.

hive> alter table mytable drop partition (date='${hiveconf:INPUT_DATE}');