Commenting out a line with Ansible lineinfile module

ansibleansible-playbook

I find it hard to believe there isn't anything that covers this use case but my search has proved fruitless.

I have a line in /etc/fstab to mount a drive that's no longer available:

//archive/Pipeline /pipeline/Archives cifs ro,credentials=/home/username/.config/cifs 0   0

What I want is to change it to 

#//archive/Pipeline /pipeline/Archives cifs ro,credentials=/home/username/.config/cifs 0   0

I was using this 

---
- hosts: slurm
  remote_user: root

  tasks:
    - name: Comment out pipeline archive in fstab
      lineinfile:
        dest: /etc/fstab
        regexp: '^//archive/pipeline'
        line: '#//archive/pipeline'
        state: present
      tags: update-fstab

expecting it to just insert the comment symbol (#), but instead it replaced the whole line and I ended up with 

#//archive/Pipeline

is there a way to glob-capture the rest of the line or just insert the single comment char?

 regexp: '^//archive/pipeline *'
 line: '#//archive/pipeline *'

or

 regexp: '^//archive/pipeline *'
 line: '#//archive/pipeline $1'

I am trying to wrap my head around lineinfile and from what I"ve read it looks like insertafter is what I'm looking for, but "insert after" isn't what I want?

Best Answer

You can use the replace module for your case:

---
- hosts: slurm
  remote_user: root

  tasks:
    - name: Comment out pipeline archive in fstab
      replace:
        dest: /etc/fstab
        regexp: '^//archive/pipeline'
        replace: '#//archive/pipeline'
      tags: update-fstab

It will replace all occurrences of the string that matches regexp.

lineinfile on the other hand, works only on one line (even if multiple matching are find in a file). It ensures a particular line is absent or present with a defined content.

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