Re: [ansible-project] newline characters in shell commands

[Kai Stian Olstad]

On 27. sep. 2017 00:55, rurpy via Ansible Project wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am new to Ansible and trying to see if it fits my needs but quickly ran
> into the following problem:
>
> $ ansible ubtest -m shell -a 'echo -n "line 1\nline 2" >/tmp/foo'
>
> /tmp/foo is created with one line containing the two characters
> "\" and "n" in the middle rather than a single linefeed ("\n")
> character as I want and expected.
>
> I apologize in advance if this has an obvious solution; I have just started
> with Ansible and there is a lot of material in the documentation but I
> didn't see anything addressing this immediately, nor did google turn up
> anything encouraging. I'm hoping there is some filter or other simple way
> to produce the desired results.
I can't confirm this behavior against Kubuntu, in my test I get to lines
in the file.

In Ansible shell is using /bin/sh, on Kubuntu /bin/sh is a link to dash.
Since echo is a builtin on most shells if not all shell, they may differ
some. So it depends on you distribution and what /bin/sh is actually
running.

To avoid this problem you could use the Ansible's copy module instead
ansible ubtest -m copy -a 'dest=/tmp/foo content="line 1\nline 2"'

--
Kai Stian Olstad