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 hosts-prod is marked as executable, 
but failed to execute correctly. If this is not supposed 
to be an executable script, correct this with 
`chmod -x hosts-prod`.

I believe this is because I am using Virtual Box and shared folders which is forcing all my files to ug+rwx. And vbox does not permit changing permissions on shared folders (at least shared folders coming from Windows which is my situation)

Is there a way to allow Ansible to run this file? I can see several options:

1. Edit hosts-prod to become an executable file. I don't know what's involved in this (being new to Ansible, obviously).
2. Set a configuration option in Ansible to tell it not to run this file as executable - just treat it as the static configuration file it is. I can't find an option to do this, so I suspect it's not possible.
3. Move the file outside of shared-folders: not an option in my case.
4. Your better idea..

All assistance/ideas appreciated!

The actual hosts-prod config file looks as follows, so any tips on making it internally executable would be welcome:

web01 ansible_ssh_host=web01.example.com
db01 ansible_ssh_host=db01.example.com

[webservers]
web01

[dbservers]
db01

[all:vars]
ansible_ssh_user=root

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 <<EOF
{
 "_meta": {
   "hostvars": {
     "host1": { "some_var": "value" }
   }
 },
 "hostgroup1": [
   "host1",
   "host2"
 ]
 ...
}
EOF

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