How to place quotes mark in ansible task with grep, awk, sed

Question

My task search for config in CMD column to gather information what is directory of application config and also PID.

---
- hosts: all
  pre_tasks:
    - name: Check if process is running
      become: yes
      shell: 'ps -e --format="pid cmd" | grep process.cfg | sed -e "s/[[:space:]]\+/ /g"| grep -v color'
      register: proces_out

output looks like this after this command:

32423 /var/local/bin/application -c /var/local/etc/process.cfg

But i think ansible have troubles with 2 greps in 1 command. I need them both because if i dont use reversed "grep -v color" this anoying thing appears "grep --color=auto ", i cant cut out PID that i need in another task which kills process because real process is in second line.

My second idea was to use AWK, which i think would be the best tool for this case, but if i use double quotation marks in --format parameter and in SED command and the single quotation mark in awk parameters they dont want to cooperate. Even if i keep them balanced they interfere with them selfs.

AWK idea:

shell: 'ps -e --format="pid cmd" | grep process.cfg | sed -e "s/[[:space:]]\+/ /g"| awk 'FNR == 2''

I want to ask for a hint what would be the best to avoid incompatibility in code and be able to use it after as a output in variable

## PID
{{ proces_out.stdout.split(' ')[0] }} 
## application
{{ proces_out.stdout.split(' ')[1] }}
## config
{{ proces_out.stdout.split(' ')[3] }}

Answer 1

But i think ansible have troubles with 2 greps in 1 command

That is for sure not true

if i dont use reversed "grep -v color" this anoying thing appears "grep --color=auto ", i cant cut out PID that i need in another task which kills process because real process is in second line.

You are running into the classic case of the grep process matching its own regex, as will happen in a lot of "simple" cases. What you want is a regex that matches your string but does not match itself. In that example above it would be:

  shell: 'ps -e --format="pid cmd" | grep process[.]cfg | sed -e "s/[[:space:]]\+/ /g"'

because process[.]cfg matches process.cfg but does not match process[.]cfg I also fixed your regex because in a regex, the . means any character, which doesn't appear to be what you really wanted to happen

With regard to that --color bit, you can likely can side-step that nonsense by using the full path to grep, which will cause bash to really execute the binary, versus some alias that uses --color=auto; I actually wouldn't have expected the colors to show up in an ansible run, because it's not the right $TERM but systems are weird