tvl's questions

On Ansible 2.2,

I have an Ansible hosts file:

[webserver]
aegir.dev

[hostmaster]
aegir.dev

I have two group_vars/ files:

# group_vars/webserver.yml
my_var:
  - vagrant

and

# group_vars/hostmaster.yml
my_var:
  - vagrant
  - aegir

and the playbook:

- hosts: webserver
  tasks:
    - debug: var=my_var

- hosts: hostmaster
  tasks:
    - debug: var=my_var

Output:

PLAY [webserver] ***************************************************************

TASK [setup] *******************************************************************
ok: [aegir.dev]

TASK [debug] *******************************************************************
ok: [aegir.dev] => {
    "my_var": [
        "vagrant",
        "aegir"
    ]
}

PLAY [hostmaster] **************************************************************

TASK [setup] *******************************************************************
ok: [aegir.dev]

TASK [debug] *******************************************************************
ok: [aegir.dev] => {
    "my_var": [
        "vagrant",
        "aegir"
    ]
}

Why both webserver and hostmaster use the variables from hostmaster.yml?

Probably I'm not using the group_vars correctly but how I can fix that?

EDIT

The real case scenario is that I have the same role running on two groups, one is webserver that actually contains 4 generic servers and the hostmaster group that is a webserver + extra configuration on the same role (the user aegir exists only on aegir.dev and not on the other 3 web-servers)

There is a directory under /var/test1 with content:

.
..
.git
.gitignore
file1
file2

and I want to copy it on an other location /var/test2 with pre-existing content:

.
..
file1

If I use the Ansible copy:

- copy:
  # note the trailing `/` at `src: /var/test1/` in order to copy the contents
  src: /var/test1/
  dest: /var/test2

it will replace the file1 in the /var/test2

How can I copy the directory contents without replacing the files at the destination?

I have a dead symlink named dead_symlink under the directory /usr/local/bin

When Ansible check the file it reports it exists

- stat: "path=/usr/local/bin/dead_symlink"
  register: dead_symlink_bin

- debug: var=dead_symlink_bin.stat.exists

But when I try to remove it, it reports 'ok' but nothing is happening (the symlink is still there)

- name: Remove symlink
  file:
    path: "path=/usr/local/bin/dead_symlink"
    state: absent

What am I doing wrong?

The file command returns me the encoding of a file + the EOL if it's not LF.

But it returns ASCII for both ANSI and UTF-8 without BOM. On UTF-8 files it returns UTF-8 Unicode (with BOM).

An I doing something wrong, or it's the default behavior? At if it's the default behavior how I can see if it's ANSI or UTF-8 without BOM?