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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OOZIE-2383?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=14946923#comment-14946923
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Egmont Koblinger commented on OOZIE-2383:
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We agree, the Hadoop ecosystem tends to use the word "shell" for whenever it
lets the user reach out to the underlying operating system. It sounds cool as a
marketing term, yet technically incorrect.
I'm not sure of other folks get often confused over this; I definitely got :)
An FYI in the doc would be nice. Or maybe an xml-tag that when set true,
automatically launches via shell; and later a corresponding Hue checkbox. That
would probably eliminate the confusion without docs. Or just overcomplicate
things, not sure :D
It's not that super important, use your best judgement.
> 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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