# here's a cool advanced topic about how to perform conditional logic in ansible without resorting # to writing your own module that defines facts. You can do that too, and it's easy to do, but # often you just want to run a command and then decide whether to run some steps or not. That's # easy to do, and here we'll show you how. - name: test playbook user: root hosts: all tasks: # it is possible to save the result of any command in a named register. This variable will be made # available to tasks and templates made further down in the execution flow. - action: shell grep hi /etc/motd ignore_errors: yes register: motd_result # and here we access the register. Note that variable is structured data because # it is a return from the command module. The shell module makes available variables such as # as 'stdout', 'stderr', and 'rc'. # here we run the next action only if the previous grep returned true - action: shell echo "motd contains the word hi" when: motd_result.rc == 0 # alternatively: - action: shell echo "motd contains the word hi" when: motd_result.stdout.find('hi') != -1