How to mention wildcard in ansible commands

Question

I am executing shell commands via Ansible.

Sometimes i don't have the complete foldername. Suppose i have dirname solr4.7.0.

In shell I can type cd solr*.

But in ansible I can't do:

chdir=/var/solr*

Is there any workaround?

Answer 1

No. The chdir= parameter to, e.g., the command module does not support wildcards.

You could accomplish what you want using a register variable to store the output of the ls command:

- shell: ls -d solr*
  register: dir_name
- command: some_command
  args:
    chdir: "{{ dir_name.stdout }}"

But this is, frankly, an ugly solution. You're better off just using the actual directory name. If it differs on different hosts, you can use host variables to set it appropriately.

Answer 2

As Larsks wrote the key is to use register, but the code was not working on my current ansible version. So here is corrected one:

- shell: ls -d solr*
  register: dir_name

- command: chdir={{ item }} some_command
  with_items: dir_name.stdout_lines