Passing input into powershell script from Ansible

Question

I have a simple powershell script(debug.ps1) which takes user input from read-host and displays it

$var = read-host "Enter text"
write-host $var

I want to run this from ansible but when I try through stdin, the job executes indefinitely. How do I pass input to read-host from ansible?

  tasks:
    - name: Executing script
      win_shell: .\debug.ps1
      
      register: output
      args:
        chdir: C:\Scripts\
        stdin: 'hello'

    - debug: var=output.stdout_lines

Try the expect module. Note the requirements on the documentation. From a very quick search, it looks like pexpect is available for windows. — Zeitounator
– Zeitounator, Commented Mar 25, 2021 at 14:43

Colyn1337 · Accepted Answer · 2021-03-25 20:48:45Z

1

Stay away from Read-Host as it's intended for interactive logon sessions, not automation. Convert to a script that accepts parameters and feed a parameter as an argument. For more advanced cases (which is literally everything other than 'helloworld') check into parameter options.

<#
.SYNOPSIS
  Do this instead
#>
Param(
  [string]$Text
)

$text

Write-Host used to be really bad because it only wrote to the console, not to one of the out streams (Powershell has 6 last I checked). However in a recent update, Write-Host now out's to the Information stream. What you need is data out on the Output stream for it to be collected properly.

So in short, stay away from Read-Host and Write-Host, use parameterization and out as object or datatype. In this case, a [string] is a datatype.

answered Mar 25, 2021 at 20:48

Colyn1337

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