Quotes in ansible lineinfile

Question

When I use lineinfile in ansible it is not writing \', \" characters lineinfile: \'dest=/home/xyz state=present line=\"CACHES=\"

Answer 1

If the content to be substituted is in a variable higher up in the playbook, it seems that you need to escape the escape characters instead of the quotes, something like this

---
- hosts: tomcat

  vars:
    classpath: "CLASSPATH=\\\"$CATALINA_HOME/bin/foo.jar\\\""

  tasks:

    - lineinfile: dest="/tomcat/bin/setenv.sh" line="{{ classpath }}" state=present

ends up with a line like this in the resulting file

CLASSPATH="$CATALINA_HOME/bin/foo.jar"