find: explicit empty excludes causes find to exclude everything

[jmazzitelli]

SUMMARY

When using find with empty excludes list, it excludes everything, yet if you remove that empty excludes entirely, the find behaves correctly (nothing is excluded).

ISSUE TYPE

• Bug Report

COMPONENT NAME

find

ANSIBLE VERSION

$ ansible --version
ansible 2.9.9
  config file = None
  configured module search path = [u'/home/jmazzite/.ansible/plugins/modules', u'/usr/share/ansible/plugins/modules']
  ansible python module location = /home/jmazzite/source/ansible/lib/ansible
  executable location = /home/jmazzite/source/ansible/bin/ansible
  python version = 2.7.5 (default, Jun 11 2019, 14:33:56) [GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-39)]

CONFIGURATION

OS / ENVIRONMENT

RHEL 7.7

STEPS TO REPRODUCE

Run find task with excludes: [ ] and see that the results come back empty - everything is excluded. But if you remove that excludes: [ ] then find results come back correctly.

- hosts: localhost
  connection: local
  tasks:
  - find:
      paths: "/etc"
      patterns: ['hosts', 'passwd']
      excludes: []
    register: test
  - debug:
      msg: "number of files found-->{{ test.files | length }}"
  - debug:
      msg: "found-->{{ item.path }}"
    loop: "{{ test.files }}"

Run that playbook via ansible-playbook playbook.yaml and see the results of find is empty - 0 files are returned:

TASK [debug] *****************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "number of files found-->0"
}

Now edit that playbook and completely delete the excludes: [ ] line and re-run it. Now see it returns the correct two files:

TASK [debug] *****************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "msg": "number of files found-->2"
}

TASK [debug] *****************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => (item=...chomp...) => {
    "msg": "found-->/etc/hosts"
}
ok: [localhost] => (item=...chomp...) => {
    "msg": "found-->/etc/passwd"
}

EXPECTED RESULTS

I expect an empty excludes list to behave identically as when excludes list is completely not specified. An empty excludes list should mean, "I do not want to exclude anything".

ACTUAL RESULTS

All files are excluded if I specify an empty list in excludes but this is wrong - that should definitely not mean "I want to exclude EVERYTHING".

[jmazzitelli]

The workaround to this is to never set an empty list in excludes: - if you want to exclude nothing, you can either delete the excludes or (if your playbook is using a variable for the list value of excludes and so excludes is always specified) you can set the list to some arbitrary value that you know will never match anything (in my case, setting it to [''] will workaround the issue).