Student Question - Can you search for pattern using ansible-navigator doc command?

[Travis]

In VI we use the / to search for a pattern in the file.

When we use something like ansible-navigator doc ansible.builtin.file it brings you to the page but is there a way to search the doc. For instance for /sym to find info for symlink?

[Travis · Accepted solution]

So there are two ways for using ansible-navigator the one method is leveraging the TUI (interactive mode) and the other method is leveraging the CLI (standard mode).

The TUI in interactive mode just brings up the listing of documentation to view the contents and this can be navigated with the arrow keys on the keyboard for scrolling. It does not provide a method to "search" using something like "/" which you can use in editors and things like more/less, etc.

However, it is possible to use the ansible-navigator doc command in the STDOUT mode and the output is redirected to STDOUT for the command line allowing the use of the "/". 

[student@workstation ~]$ ansible-navigator doc yum -m stdout

Results

> ANSIBLE.BUILTIN.YUM    (/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ansible/modules/yum.>

        Installs, upgrade, downgrades, removes, and lists packages and
        groups with the `yum' package manager. This module only works
        on Python 2. If you require Python 3 support see the
        [ansible.builtin.dnf] module.

ADDED IN: historical

  * note: This module has a corresponding action plugin.

OPTIONS (= is mandatory):

- allow_downgrade
        Specify if the named package and version is allowed to
        downgrade a maybe already installed higher version of that
        package. Note that setting allow_downgrade=True can make this
        module behave in a non-idempotent way. The task could end up
        with a set of packages that does not match the complete list
        of specified packages to install (because dependencies between
        the downgraded package and others can cause changes to the
        packages which were in the earlier transaction).
        [Default: no]
        type: bool
/EXAM

So this opens it to where it is able to accept input like "/" to search for something like EXAM to take you to the EXAMPLES section.

EXAMPLES:

- name: Install the latest version of Apache
  ansible.builtin.yum:
    name: httpd
    state: latest

- name: Install Apache >= 2.4
  ansible.builtin.yum:
    name: httpd>=2.4
    state: present

- name: Install a list of packages (suitable replacement for 2.11 loop deprecat>
  ansible.builtin.yum:
    name:
      - nginx
      - postgresql
      - postgresql-server
    state: present

- name: Install a list of packages with a list variable
  ansible.builtin.yum:
    name: "{{ packages }}"
  vars:
:

So it is possible to search, but you need to remember to use STDOUT for ansible-navigator instead of INTERACTIVE mode. This can be done by using -m stdout appended to the end of the command.