# Small tweaks to ansible-command (not about multiprocessing issues)

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/small-tweaks-to-ansible-command-not-about-multiprocessing-issues/11313>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [February 29, 2012, 2:26am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/small-tweaks-to-ansible-command-not-about-multiprocessing-issues/11313 "2012-02-29T02:26:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan)\
**Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 2:26am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/small-tweaks-to-ansible-command-not-about-multiprocessing-issues/11313/1 "2012-02-29T02:26:22Z")

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So I’ve removed a few options that I hope should not be too  
controversial, and also applied some code cleanup.

I think ansible-command is going to be a WIDELY used program, so I  
want it to be really simple and not have terribly many options.

(I am also probably going to go through the core and eliminate the  
uppercase options and minor things like that to /bin/ansible)

I think the main one lost is “save to output file”, which can be  
accomplished with the shell. I kept tree output and refined the  
output from the --one-time options a minor amount.

I also decided to always include the return codes, since it did not  
seem damaging to always include them, rather than making that an  
option.

Another option I removed was --host, which allows passing in the  
contents of the host list, but it also overrode pattern, which was not  
needed.  
If pattern is “\*”, the correct way to do that is override the host list.

So what I’m thinking is this… if we detect that -H is not a file  
name (not os.path.exists), but is a string runner can assume they are  
hostnames and auto-split on “,”, and possibly  
printing out an alert to stdout. In short, this allows us to reuse  
the Runner API versus making each module handle this.

I will probably also make Runner understand askpass such that we do  
not have to implement prompting for the password in each helper  
script, TBD.

The code stuff shouldn’t be too painful, but I’m trying to do a few  
things like not use one letter vars, use under\_scores for variables,  
and comment things  
so the code is extra friendly to new users, and encourages the kinds  
of things I’m going for. Obviously other things people want (like  
sane indents)  
which I am guilty of not doing are important too 🙂

Once things stabalize, it will be time to give ansible-command a  
manpage and billing on [README.md](http://README.md)

OT – I’m also working on ansible-playbook, which will take hardly any  
options at all since I want most of those sourced from the playbook  
itself.

–Michael