"here doc" in shell command

Archives Ansible Project
1

I am trying to use a “here doc” in a shell command like so:

  • name: frustration
    shell: |
    cat <<-EOF | my_program
    input line 1
    input line 2
    EOF
    another_program

along with a number of permutations, all of which have resulted in “bash: line 3: warning: here-document at line 0 delimited by end-of-file (wanted `EOF’)”.

I found this:
https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/12856
which seems to imply there is some way to accomplish what I’m trying do but I can’t understand how, nor do I see anything else relevant in the Ansible docs or Google.

What is the magic syntax for the above?

2

`

  • name: fun fun fun
    shell:
    cmd: |
    #!/bin/bash
    SCRIPT=$(cat <<EOF
    echo “hello world!”
    EOF
    )
    ${SCRIPT}

`

Solution found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40230184/how-to-do-multiline-shell-script-in-ansible

3

Ah, thank you very much! I actually had seen that SO post before but realize now when I tried it I screwed up (I had left the vertical bar character on the “shell” line, not the command line.) Now I see it does in fact work.

But one further question… Where is “cmd” documented?

4

Good point. It’s seems not officially documented. In my local Ansible installation I’ve found the relating code part
in playbook/tasks.py

`

182 # the command/shell/script modules used to support the cmd arg,
183 # which corresponds to what we now call _raw_params, so move that
184 # value over to _raw_params (assuming it is empty)
185 if action in (‘command’, ‘shell’, ‘script’):
186 if ‘cmd’ in args:
187 if args.get(‘_raw_params’, ‘’) != ‘’:
188 raise AnsibleError(“The ‘cmd’ argument cannot be used when other raw parameters are specified.”
189 " Please put everything in one or the other place.", obj=ds)
190 args[‘_raw_params’] = args.pop(‘cmd’)

`