Change current directory before tasks are run

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1

I am trying to create a playbook to unmount an AFS mounted home directory, but I can’t unmount it because the user running ansible has open files because of ansible. I can’t do this with user with a local home, or ssh configs or anything like that. I need to do it with a regular ansible play and regular user, so no funky ssh configs or other changes to my hosts.

Here is my play:

  • name: check if files are open in /afs
    raw: “cd / && /usr/sbin/lsof /afs”
    register: command_result
    failed_when: “command_result.rc != 1”

If I run it with ansible, it will succeed, but ansible-playbook will show two processes spawned by the ansible run (sh and sudo).

Is there a way to change the current directory before tasks are run?

Thanks,
Jesse

2

Does the chdir argument to raw work?

  raw: "/usr/sbin/lsof /afs" chdir="/"

3

Another thought might be to use the “at” module to defer execution of this particular command, sleep a bit to let it run, and then proceed?

4

Or configure ansible.cfg to use a different temp dir path?

5

raw doesn’t seem to have a chdir option or it doesn’t have the effect I need, command does but it still shows open files. I already have remote_tmp set to a different directory. I’m sure I could do something with at, but that’s not the cleanest way to do it. I had thought to set “sudo_exe = cd / && sudo” but that caused errors about executing sudo.

6

If remote temp is outside of your home why would it still prevent things from unmounting?

7

The CWD of the shell and sudo are still the home directory. The chdir needs to happen before sudo is called.