ansible/rst/modules/command.rst

command

The command module takes the command name followed by a list of arguments, space delimited.

parameter	required	default	comments
(free form)	N/A	N/A	the command module takes a free form command to run
creates	no		a filename, when it already exists, this step will NOT be run
chdir	no		cd into this directory before running the command (0.6 and later)

The given command will be executed on all selected nodes. It will not be processed through the shell, so variables like "$HOME" and operations like "<", ">", "|", and "&" will not work. As such, all paths to commands must be fully qualified.

Note

If you want to run a command through the shell (say you are using '<', '>', '|', etc), you actually want the 'shell' module instead. The 'command' module is much more secure as it's not affected by the user's environment.

Example action from Ansible playbooks:

command /sbin/shutdown -t now

creates and chdir can be specified after the command. For instance, if you only want to run a command if a certain file does not exist, you can do the following:

command /usr/bin/make_database.sh arg1 arg2 creates=/path/to/database

The creates= and chdir options will not be passed to the actual executable.