Author: Sahil Suri

Introduction Commands like sed and awk allow us to harness the power of regular expressions to search for text-based patterns in files and manipulate the matched text as per our requirement. The thing about regular expressions is that they are confusing. To the new Linux user, regular expressions may as well be another language. Although sed and awk are very powerful tools, mastering them is a tedious task for a system administrator. While working on the command line, we frequently interact with various system configuration files and sometimes we need to modify these files to suit our needs. This requirement may span across a fleet of systems as well. Using awk or sed to modify multiline strings in files over ssh could prove to be a handful. Luckily, we can use the replace module in ansible to search for and replace multiple lines between two patterns. In this post, we will share a sample Ansible playbook that replaces multiple lines of text between two patterns. We can view documentation for the replace module using ansible-doc. Given below is a snippet from the output. root@linuxnix ~]# ansible-doc replace > REPLACE (/usr/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ansible/modules/files/replace.py) This module will replace all instances of a pattern within a file. It is up to the user to maintain idempotence by ensuring that the same pattern would never match any replacements made. * This module is maintained by...