Remove a line from a file using ansible?

Question

I have a file called authorized_keys. I need to delete a particular line using an Ansible script.

The problem is when I try to remove a line that includes a '+' character. Ansible is not able to remove this line.

e.g authorized_keys file is:

 .....
 abhi foo+bar saken
 ......(EOF)

I want to remove the abhi foo+bar saken line but Ansible is not removing this line because of the + character.

I am able to remove lines that do not contain a + character .

Task:

- name: Delete keys in sysadmin/.ssh/authoriezd_keys
  lineinfile: dest=/home/{{name}}/.ssh/authorized_keys
              state=absent 
              regexp='^{{key}}$' 

PS: I am using Ansible's lineinfile module

Answer 1

The problem probably is that + has a meaning in a regular expression.

You should be able to fix it by escaping the +. If you can't do that from the source where {{ key }} is defined, you can escape it with the replace Jinja filter:

- name: Delete keys in sysadmin/.ssh/authoriezd_keys
  lineinfile: dest=/home/{{name}}/.ssh/authorized_keys
              state=absent
              regexp='^{{ key | replace("+", "\+") }}$'

You might run into more problems if {{ key }} contains other characters which have a meaning in regular expressions. If that's the case I think the safe way would be to create your own filter plugin where you simply return the input passed through re.escape.