A temporary workaround for vagrant with freebsd 10.2 guest to work with ansible 2.0.0: manually changing the default shell of freebsd from csh to sh through vagrant builtin privision.

config.vm.define :server do |server|
....
server.vm.provision "shell",
run: "always",
inline: "chsh -s /bin/sh vagrant"
....
end

Something has changed at "mkdtemp" method for ansible versions > 1.9.4. The echo part echo "$( echo $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1449517181.33-230267840450118 )" ) from this method seems to have caused the problem for csh. Have not got time to dig into it though.

have you set ansible_shell_type=csh for that host?

No, I did not set ansible_shell_type=csh. I found that the worse part is that even when I make it NOT to be csh (e.g., sh), it seemed to have no effect. That made me to resort to vagrant provision instead.

if your target machine is using a csh type shell you need to set that var, otherwise ansible will use the default (sh) which will produce the error you show above.

if you don't want to set the var then changing the shell to sh is the other way to make it work.

Closing this as it seems to just be a misunderstanding on the shell settings.

Does version 1.9.4 work with csh out of box?

In my test, 1.9.4 works with the target machine and 2.0 does not. I see some changes in "mkdtemp" method for ansible versions > 1.9.4 causes the problem.

tested latest stable-2.0 and it works, there were versions of 2.0 in which this was broken, can you use latest?

Looks like the method below (from version > 1.9.4) caused the problem. It issued a command like umask 22 && mkdir -p "$( echo $HOME/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1449517181.33-230267840450118 through ssh. The command gives the error Illegal variable name. if being run under csh, same with the error reported from ansible. I checked 1.9.4 and the generated command from mkdtemp(1.9.4) is different and seems to able to succeed on csh. The method I referred to is in lib/ansible/plugins/shell/sh.py, which has been changed from 1.9.4 to 2.0.0. You may have the reason to change it. I just noticed that this change make it fail on csh.

    def mkdtemp(self, basefile=None, system=False, mode=None):
        if not basefile:
            basefile = 'ansible-tmp-%s-%s' % (time.time(), random.randint(0, 2**48))
        basetmp = self.join_path(C.DEFAULT_REMOTE_TMP, basefile)
        if system and (basetmp.startswith('$HOME') or basetmp.startswith('~/')):
            basetmp = self.join_path('/tmp', basefile)
        cmd = 'mkdir -p %s echo %s %s' % (self._SHELL_SUB_LEFT, basetmp, self._SHELL_SUB_RIGHT)
        cmd += ' %s echo %s echo %s %s' % (self._SHELL_AND, self._SHELL_SUB_LEFT, basetmp, self._SHELL_SUB_RIGHT)

        # change the umask in a subshell to achieve the desired mode
        # also for directories created with `mkdir -p`
        if mode:
            tmp_umask = 0o777 & ~mode
            cmd = '%s umask %o %s %s %s' % (self._SHELL_GROUP_LEFT, tmp_umask, self._SHELL_AND, cmd, self._SHELL_GROUP_RIGHT)

        return cmd

pushed fix, this now works in stable-2.0 and devel also

Thanks!