Automating File Reading with Ansible

How to use find, slurp, and debug to read and display all the text files in a directory.

Introduction

Automation is key in modern IT infrastructure management. Ansible, a powerful automation tool, makes it easy to manage complex environments. One of the many tasks you can automate with Ansible is reading content from multiple files. This article will guide you through a simple playbook that reads content from text files within a specified directory and displays the content.

Understanding the Playbook

The provided playbook is designed to run on the local host and performs the following tasks:

1. List all text files in the specified directory and its subdirectories.
2. Read the content from each text file.
3. Display the content of the files.

Let’s break down each section of the playbook to understand how it works.

Listing Files in a Directory

First, we use the ansible.builtin.find module to list all text files in the specified directory (/path/to/your/directory). The…