How to verify case-insensitive filepath in Ansible

Question

My server has the below path where the hostname i.e "myhost1" folder can either be in upper case or lower case as shown in example below.

/app/cell/myhost1_sales075/nodes/Node009/servers/server.xml

or the path could be in upper case hostname like below

/app/cell/MYHOST1_sales075/nodes/Node009/servers/server.xml

Below is my playbook which checks if the path exists else it will fail.

Note: ansible_hostname may either return myhost1 (lowercase) or MYHOST1 (uppercase)

- name: check if Path is valid
  shell: "ls -l /app/cell/{{ ansible_hostname }}*/nodes/*Node*/servers/server.xml"
  ignore_errors: yes
  register: shorewall

- fail:
    msg: Path or server name is invalid. Kindly enter correct PATH. Exiting Now...
  when: shorewall.rc != 0

The problem I face is that my check is case sensitive when I want it to be case-insensitive. Thus my playbook should not fail if hostname is either upper or lowercase along with the wildcard "*"

Can you please let me know what changes I need to do in my playbook for the Path check to be case-insensitive ?

Answer 1

Note: this is only answering your direct question. Meanwhile you should consider reviewing your current script and use the stat module to check for file presence instead of ignoring errors on ls launched in a shell

---

The solution below will check both path, then extract all the rc fields in your results registered var with json_query and check if at least one of them returned 0

Prereq: pip install jmespath on the controller machine (required by json_query filter).

---
- name: Verify upper/lower path with ls in shell (bad)
  hosts: localhost
  gather_facts: false

  tasks:

    - name: Check my path
      shell: "ls -l /tmp/{{ item }}"
      register: my_path
      ignore_errors: yes
      loop:
        - "{{ inventory_hostname }}"
        - "{{ inventory_hostname | upper }}"

    - name: Fail if path does not exists
      fail:
        msg: path does not exists
      when: 0 not in (my_path | json_query('results[].rc[]'))

---

Update

Using json_query might have been an overkill here. You can get the same result with core filters:

      when: 0 not in (my_path.results | map(attribute="rc'))