[PM-1889] Escape command line args passed to Job

[mayani]

Currently, when we invoke job.add_args("1 2") it is written to the YAML file as below, but the same is written to the .sh file as 1 2 instead of '1 2'.

- type: job
  name: ls
  arguments:
  - 1 2
  - 3 4

pegasus-kickstart  -n ls -N ID0000001 -o listing.txt -R condorpool  -s listing.txt=listing.txt -L .. /bin/ls 1 2 3 4

When writing the arguments into the .sh file, they should be shell escaped.

Reporter: @mayani
Watchers:
@papajim
@mayani
@vahi

[mayani]

Author: @vahi

the planner when parsing the abstract workflow, it has to deserialize to a string
arg string: '1 2' '3 4'

we have users who encode quoted arguments in the arg strings . what are the ramifications there?

[mayani]

Author: @papajim

In python you can have an arg of type list.
example:
parser.add_argument("--my_list", metavar="INT", type=int, nargs='+')

in this example you can invoke the python code as:
python3 my_code --my_list 1 2 --> my_list = [1, 2]
but the following will fail
python3 my_code --my_list '1 2' since it expects integers

[mayani]

Author: @mayani

@papajim That means 1 2 and 2 separate args and should show up as. The Python lib assigning them to one variable doesn't make it one arg ie 12
args:

• 1
• 2
  and not
• 1 2

[mayani]

Author: @vahi

also if arg is *txt , then quoting it as '*txt' will disable expansion in bash!

[mayani]

Author: @vahi

we need to update the python api documentation to give examples on how the user needs to handle it themselves.