While you can use win_shell I find it is better to use win_command when it comes to running executables, this way you don't fall prey to the shell specific escaping, e.g. when using win_shell you usually have to do it like;
- win_shell: &"C:\Program Files\someapp\app.exe" compared to - win_command: '"C:\Program Files\someapp\app.exe"' This is because win_shell will automatically run the param in PowerShell as an encoded command and when a quoted value is run in powershell it will just print it to the screen, the & tells it to execute it. You read more about this here http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/windows_usage.html#running-commands. For your specific situation I would try (note you would need some sort of when clause to skip this task if it is already uninstalled); - name: uninstall application win_command: '"C:\Program Files (x86)\My Software\It Is Mine\myagent\uninstall.exe" /S "_?=C:\Program Files (x86)\My Software\It Is Mine\myagent"' In this example, I have * put the entire win_command value inside single quotes that tells the Ansible yml parser this is all one value and ignore things like double quotes, backslashes and other escaping chars * used double quotes to enclose the first argument which is the path to the executable as well as the 3rd argument which also has spaces in it * I didn't use jinja2 blocks but if you need to substitute the path, leave the quoting as is as it is very important they stay like that, e.g. make it like - win_command: '"{{ uninstall_path }}" /S "_?={{ unisntall_path }}"' In the end Windows will see this as argv[0] = C:\Program Files (x86)\My Software\It Is Mine\myagent\uninstall.exe argv[1] = /S argv[2] = _?=C:\Program Files (x86)\My Software\It Is Mine\myagent Where argv[0] is the path to the executable that is used to start the process. This follows Microsoft standard rules for argument parsing and in the application entry point, the argv array above is what will be passed in so it should work. Hopefully this helps you with what you need to do. 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/1bd599f5-967e-462b-8d09-d19f6ec328b6%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.