As sryza reported, spark-shell doesn't accept any flags.
The root cause is wrong usage of spark-submit in spark-shell and it come to the surface by #1801

Author: Kousuke Saruta <sarutak@oss.nttdata.co.jp>
Author: Cheng Lian <lian.cs.zju@gmail.com>

Closes #1715, Closes #1864, and Closes #1861

Closes #1825 from sarutak/SPARK-2894 and squashes the following commits:

47f3510 [Kousuke Saruta] Merge branch 'master' of git://git.apache.org/spark into SPARK-2894
2c899ed [Kousuke Saruta] Removed useless code from java_gateway.py
98287ed [Kousuke Saruta] Removed useless code from java_gateway.py
513ad2e [Kousuke Saruta] Modified util.sh to enable to use option including white spaces
28a374e [Kousuke Saruta] Modified java_gateway.py to recognize arguments
5afc584 [Cheng Lian] Filter out spark-submit options when starting Python gateway
e630d19 [Cheng Lian] Fixing pyspark and spark-shell CLI options