Add parameter to local/remote shell runner to change delimiter in named parameters

While assisting some users today, I ran into a problem with optparse. In a nutshell, parsing options is hard in Bash, so there are many tendencies to shortcut. One such example:

while [ -n "$1" ]; do
    case $1 in
        -C|--gecos)    gecos=$2;  shift 2;;
        -e|--email)    email=$2;  shift 2;;
        -u|--userid)   userid=$2; shift 2;;
        -d|--dry-run)  dryrun=1;  shift;;
        -h|--help)     usage;;
        *) shift;;
    esac
done

Today, I can change the kwargs_op to any prefix I so desire. But, in all cases, the input is distilled to a dict, and then rendered as key-value pairs. (e.g.: --email=[e-mail]). This causes a failure with the above logic.

This is not an uncommon pattern, and it would be good to be able to s/=/ / in the above parameter.

[jfryman]

@lakshmi-kannan @manasdk fwiw, I’m not immediately blocked. The “workaround” was to fix the underlying script.

I avoided using the cmd jinja pattern hack as I think it’s certainly an antipattern we need to watch carefully. It is supported (https://docs.stackstorm.com/runners.html?highlight=runner#runner-parameters). It is disjointed to have the ability to modify the kwargs_op option, but not have one for the delimiter between keyword parameters. If anything, dropping to the cmd and writing it out manually all but nullifies the need for kwargs_op, since I could define it in the cmd for that need as well.

[powellchristoph]

I have a simple bash script with named cli arguments that I am trying to use the local-shell-script with. I was able to change the kwarg_op seperator, but the runner still uses the = to separate k/v items.

So alittle script like this below would be called from the command like like: ./script.sh -r foo -w /tmp -s server -c client or ./script.sh -r foo -w /tmp I don’t want to use positional args, because they aren’t all required.

#!/bin/bash

while getopts r:w:c:s:m: option
do
    case "${option}" in
        r) REGION=${OPTARG//=/};;
        w) WORKDIR=${OPTARG//=/};;
        s) SERVER="ParameterValue=${OPTARG//=/}";;
        c) CLIENT="ParameterValue=${OPTARG//=/}";;
        m) MANIFEST=${OPTARG//=/}
            ;;
    esac
done

But using the following meta parameters. It gets passed by Stackstorm as ./script.sh -r=foo -w=/tmp -s=server -c=client

parameters:
  w:
    type: "string"
    required: true
  r:
    type: "string"
    required: true
  s:
    type: "string"
  c:
    type: "string"
  m:
    type: "string"
  kwarg_op:
    type: "string"
    immutable: true
    default: "-"

So now my args are passed to my script by getopts as =value and I have to use the ${OPTARG//=/} to strip it off.