Ansible error on shell command returning zero
since you want to run a sequence of commands that involve pipe, ansible states you should use shell
and not command
, as you are doing.
So, the problem is the fact that grep returns 1 (didnt find a match on the swapon output), and ansible considers this a failure. Since you are well sure there is no issue, just add a ignore_errors: true
and be done with it.
- name: Check if swap exists
shell: "swapon -s | grep -ci non_existent_string"
register: swap_exists
ignore_errors: true
OR:
if you want to narrow it down to return codes 0 and 1, instruct ansible to not consider failures those 2 rcs:
- name: Check if swap exists
shell: "swapon -s | grep -ci non_existent_string"
register: swap_exists
# ignore_errors: true
failed_when: swap_exists.rc != 1 and swap_exists.rc != 0
I found a better way. if you only need to know the record number this works:
- name: Check if swap exists
shell: "swapon -s | grep -i dev|wc -l"
register: swap_exists
Another way is to always use cat at the end of the pipe. See Ansible shell module returns error when grep results are empty
- name: Check if swap exists
shell: "swapon -s | grep -i dev|cat"
register: swap_exists