[jira] [Commented] (OOZIE-2383) Bad naming: "Shell" action has nothing to do with shells

["Harsh J (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OOZIE-2383?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=14946407#comment-14946407 ] 

Harsh J commented on OOZIE-2383:
--------------------------------

The naming intention intends to mean that you may run shell scripts (or basically any program). I've not observed people getting confused over this so far, although what you say is technically correct. The name seems to market itself well to the users, so I'd be hesitant in changing it.

We could add a doc-note though, if you've often seen folks get confused over this?

> 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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