after reading https://cwiki.apache.org/MAHOUT/itembased-collaborative-filtering.html I've identified this is EXACTLY what I would like to do... however.. I don't actually have any examples to confirm this.
Can a kind sole out there please just give me a linux cmd line (preferably with a 5 line data example) of how I can run mahout with this dataset ? It's installed exactly as per the install instructions, ie via svn and maven.
The command line options are spelled out right there -- what are you looking for? Maybe you want to read up on how you run a Hadoop job on the command line, which would be the rest of the command line you want.
This is also covered in detail in Mahout in Action.