I don't think win_shell is necessary, you are truly trying to run an executable and don't want to confuse issues that may be related to how the shell handles things and how a command handles it. In your case you will need to enclose the full command with a single quote ', you tried this but I think forgot to close the string with a ' hence Ansible telling you that there was inbalanced quotes. I just tried the following on a brand new server and it was successful in install Cygwin.
- hosts: '2012R2' gather_facts: no tasks: - name: download Cygwin installer win_get_url: url: https://cygwin.com/setup-x86_64.exe dest: C:\temp\setup-x86_64.exe - name: install Cygwin win_command: 'C:\temp\setup-x86_64.exe --root C:\cygwin64 --quiet-mode --site http://cygwin.mirror.constant.com --packages "openssh,rsync,zip,vim,wget,nano"' As you can see, the whole string for win_command is enclosed with ' and it has allowed me to continue to use " and \ without escaping anything. Here you can see Cygwin is installed and up and running <https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k2_L64sggLI/WgS3VyqlLKI/AAAAAAAAARs/yxWDMQ_-gcoFq3WzyvLGOm-Cjbt7LGTtgCLcBGAs/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2017-11-10%2Bat%2B6.13.55%2Bam.png> Thanks Jordan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ansible Project" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ansible-project+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to ansible-project@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ansible-project/8d008be2-5b25-4f64-87eb-5ba5c1508e03%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
