Egmont Koblinger created OOZIE-2383:
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Summary: Bad naming: "Shell" action has nothing to do with shells
Key: OOZIE-2383
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OOZIE-2383
Project: Oozie
Issue Type: Bug
Components: action
Affects Versions: 4.1.0
Reporter: Egmont Koblinger
Priority: Minor
The "shell" action has an incorrect, and hence badly misleading name, since in
fact it has nothing to do with shells. It's just launching an external command
(and by the way it's also totally irrelevant whether that happens to be a shell
script or a binary).
The term "shell" refers to a utility that does complex parsing, such as
splitting at spaces, handling quotes, variable substitution, output
redirection, piping etc., like bash, zsh, tcsh do. In Oozie none of these
happens – neither does Oozie launch the command via a shell, nor does it
internally duplicate even the most basic features of shells.
If the action is called "shell", I expect whatever I type there to be parsed by
a shell (i.e. passed as a single argument to /bin/sh -c), so that I'm able to
have space-separated argument list, redirection etc. which I can't have right
now.
If no shell is involved (as that's the case with Oozie), the action should not
be called "shell". It could be called "launch", "run", "execute", whatever
along these lines, but definitely not "shell", since it's just not.
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