CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxansible
darego101
darego101

Reputation: 329

Reading environment variables with ad-hoc ansible command

I am trying to run a simple ad-hoc ansible command on various hosts to find out if a directory exists.

The following command works correctly by returning exists although it does not print the environment variable beforehand:

ansible all -i hosts.list -m shell -a "if test -d /the/dir/; then echo '$HOSTNAME exists'; fi"

Can anyone please tell me why only exists is returned instead of HOSTNAME exists?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 835

Answers (1)

larsks
larsks

Reputation: 311416

Because it's included in double quotes ("), your $HOSTNAME is being interpreted by your local shell. You probably want to write instead:

ansible all -i hosts.list -m shell -a \
  'if test -d /the/dir/; then echo "$HOSTNAME exists"; fi'

In most cases you will want to use single quotes (') for your argument to -a when you're using the shell module to prevent your local shell from expanding variables, etc, that are intended to be expanded on the remote host.

Upvotes: 3

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