Running exe on windows from a batch file

I don’t think win_shell is necessary, you are truly trying to run an executable and don’t want to confuse issues that may be related to how the shell handles things and how a command handles it. In your case you will need to enclose the full command with a single quote ', you tried this but I think forgot to close the string with a ’ hence Ansible telling you that there was inbalanced quotes. I just tried the following on a brand new server and it was successful in install Cygwin.

  • hosts: ‘2012R2’
    gather_facts: no
    tasks:

  • name: download Cygwin installer
    win_get_url:
    url: https://cygwin.com/setup-x86_64.exe
    dest: C:\temp\setup-x86_64.exe

  • name: install Cygwin
    win_command: ‘C:\temp\setup-x86_64.exe --root C:\cygwin64 --quiet-mode --site http://cygwin.mirror.constant.com --packages “openssh,rsync,zip,vim,wget,nano”’

As you can see, the whole string for win_command is enclosed with ’ and it has allowed me to continue to use " and \ without escaping anything. Here you can see Cygwin is installed and up and running

Thanks

Jordan