Shell Permission denied

A simple task of listing/removing/installing a ElasticSearch plugin has got me baffled! What am I missing here?

Here’s my playbook:

My OCD is noticing that Ansible’s running --list, but you use -l from the command line. Of course no difference, right?

I don’t know what the problem is, but maybe it’s not becoming root? Can you shell:whoami?

shell: whoami is returning root. But root access isn’t required to run that script from the command line.

changed: [esserver] => {“changed”: true, “cmd”: “whoami”, “delta”: “0:00:00.014084”, “end”: “2015-10-21 20:28:46.975832”, “rc”: 0, “start”: “2015-10-21 20:28:46.961748”, “stderr”: “”, “stdout”: “root”, “warnings”: }

It appears to be something that the /usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/plugin script is trying to do with the older version of ES(1.5.3) that I’m trying to run this command on. Updated ES to 1.7.1 and my Ansible shell stuff is working fine.