Can't use ansible inventory file because it is executable

Question

I am trying to run an Ansible inventory file ansible -i hosts-prod all -u root -m ping and it is failing with this message:

ERROR: The file host         


        

Answer 1

Executable inventories are parsed as JSON instead of ini files, so you can convert it to a script that outputs JSON. On top of that, Ansible passes some arguments to them to a simple 'cat' isn't enough:

#!/bin/bash
cat <

Not as elegant as a simple 'cat', but should work.