Nested directory walking question

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1

I’d like to walk a directory hierarchy of the form ///. is a fixed root directory, and isn’t relevant. I have a number of directories, which represent machine categories. Under each are zero or more directories, which are string values for that category. Finally, is a directory hierarchy to copy to machines that match the parent / combination. For example:

/tmp/test/color/red/etc/passwd
/tmp/test/color/green/etc/motd
/tmp/test/flavor/cinnamon/var/something

here is /tmp/test. There are two categories (color and flavor): the first (color) has two subdirectories (red and green) and the second (flavor) has one (cinnamon). Each has a different (file hierarchy) to be copied to machines that match /.

How do I walk each , passing its value, its subdirectories, and their subdirectories to a task? I need to consider and together with other vars and facts (machine “colors” and “flavors”) to pick target destinations for .

I’ve looked at the various loop constructs, and see how to chain with register, but not how to populate the lists for with_nested.

Thanks!
2

So there’s already “with_fileglob” in Ansible

  • debug: msg={{ path }}
    with_fileglob: /path/to/files//.tgz

This isn’t recursive however, despite being able to specify multiple directories to read.

It would be possible to make a lookup plugin that was, like a “with_fileglob_recursive” that used the results of something like os.path.walk.

So basically yes, you need a new one.

With_nested is for constructing nested loops and is something a bit different.

3

Thanks, Michael. It looks like with_fileglob() only shows files, not directories, so that wouldn’t work for me.

I’m testing a workaround using “find” or “ls”, then split() to grab , , and . It would be nice to pass and as arguments to a task using the synchronize module.

4

I wouldn’t shell out.

I’d call python’s very handy os.path.walk with a custom function. If you’d like to talk about this, ansible-devel is probably a bit more on topic (and I’m trying to spur that list into greater life).