Ansible shell command adding backslash

Archives Ansible Project
1

Hello,

  • name: Determining Source Account DB Password
    shell: cat wp-config.php | grep DB_PASSWORD | awk -F"[‘’]" ‘{print $4}’
    register: wp_dbpw_source

If the password contains a backslash, the output doubles the number of backslashes.

abc*# becomes abc\*#

I’m aware extra escape characters are only for display purposes, and not actually sent to the command.

But the distorted password output prevents the script from accessing the database. When I remove the backslash from the password, the script works again.

Is there a way to output a shell command using grep, cat or awk that doesn’t cause this distortion?

Thanks,

Mark T.

2

As much as I like them I would recommend against grep/cat/awk in this
case as it makes things very fragile.
Instead try to use something that PHP and ansible can both use - such as JSON.

For example my WordPress has:

define('DB_PASSWORD',
'(U>Trob!t]J=-APTjNr[b9()yL#-95r8[3s4MpM~S0dI=`Pb7td9$):M{kENu|i323');

This playbook then gets that password:

  tasks:
    - name: JSON encode constants
      command: php -r 'require_once("wp-config.php");
        echo json_encode(get_defined_constants(true)["user"]);'
      register: php_out

    - set_fact:
        php_constants: "{{ php_out.stdout | from_json }}"

    - debug: var=php_constants.DB_PASSWORD

TASK [debug] ***************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [wp] =>
  php_constants.DB_PASSWORD:
(U>Trob!t]J=-APTjNr[b9()yL#-95r8[3s4MpM~S0dI=`Pb7td9$):M{kENu|i323

DIck

3

Obviously this method gets you all the other constants as welll

4

Hello,

Thanks for the feedback. Your code works with all special characters that I’ve used, but I run into a problem when there are two backslashes (\) side-by-side in a password.

Is there any way to fix this?

Regards,

Mark

5

Do you mean the actual password has two, or the escaped string had two (meaning the password has one)?