Ansible not escaping windows path first argument

Question

I have playbook with windows path name in the extra arguments. first argument not escaping the drive letter and slash.

ansible-playbook d.yaml  --extra-vars \"ai         


        

Answer 1

installdir prints as c:\test, I expect it should print as c:\\test

installdir contains: c : tab e s t.

tab is replaced with \t in the debug module output and in effect you see c:\test on the screen.

Other characters starting with backslash in your example (\p, \o, \l) do not have special meaning, so they are treated as two character strings; but you'd observe the same phenomenon with \n (and other escape sequences).

---

1. Don't use debug module to debug things concerned with data, it processes strings to make them printable.

   Instead, use copy with content parameter and check the output in a file:

   - copy:
       content: |-
         installdir={{ installdir }}
         stragedir={{ stagedir }}
         outdir={{ outdir }}
       dest: ./result.txt
   

   (remember you could/should use hexdump to verify what's really inside).

2. Use:

   ansible-playbook d.yaml --extra-vars "ainstalldir=c:\\\test stagedir=D:\\\packages outdir=d:\\\output\\\log"
   

   or

   ansible-playbook d.yaml --extra-vars 'ainstalldir=c:\\test stagedir=D:\\packages outdir=d:\\output\\log'
   

   Backslashes in double- and single quotes are interpreted differently by shell (see for example this question).