How it works...

In this recipe, we are using the ios_command module in order to execute operational commands on the IOS devices, and saving them to text files. In order to achieve this goal, we perform the following steps:

• We create the folders that we will store the output to, and we create a folder called configs to store the running config of all the devices. We also create an op_data file to store the output of the operational commands that we will get from the devices.
• We then execute the show running command on all the IOS devices in our inventory and we register the output in a new variable called show_run.
• We use the copy module to save the output from the previous task to a file for each device. The output from the command run is saved in the stdout variable. As we executed a single command, the stdout variable only has a single item (stdout[0]).

Once we execute this task, we can see that the configs folder is populated as shown in the following output:

$ tree configs/
 configs/
 ├── access01.cfg
 ├── access02.cfg
 ├── core01.cfg
 ├── core02.cfg
 ├── isp01.cfg
 ├── wan01.cfg
 └── wan02.cfg

For the next part, we create a folder for each node to store the output from the multiple show commands that we will execute on the IOS devices.

We use the ios_command module to execute the show commands on the devices, and save all the output in a new variable called op_output. We use the copy execute command, show ip route, and we create a file for the output of this command with the name show_ip_route.txt.

After running this task, we can see that this is the current structure of the op_data folder:

$ tree op_data/
 op_data/
 ├── access01
 │ ├── show_ip_ospf_neighbor.txt
 │ └── show_ip_route.txt
 ├── access02
 │ ├── show_ip_ospf_neighbor.txt
 │ └── show_ip_route.txt
 ├── core01
 │ ├── show_ip_ospf_neighbor.txt
 │ └── show_ip_route.txt
 ├── core02
 │ ├── show_ip_ospf_neighbor.txt
 │ └── show_ip_route.txt
 ├── isp01
 │ ├── show_ip_ospf_neighbor.txt
 │ └── show_ip_route.txt
 ├── wan01
 │ ├── show_ip_ospf_neighbor.txt
 │ └── show_ip_route.txt
 └── wan02
 ├── show_ip_ospf_neighbor.txt
 └── show_ip_route.txt

We can check the content of one of the files to confirm that all the data has been stored:

$ head op_data/core01/show_ip_ospf_neighbor.txt

Neighbor ID     Pri   State           Dead Time   Address         Interface
10.100.1.3        0   FULL/  -        00:00:37    10.3.1.2        Ethernet1/0
10.100.1.2        0   FULL/  -        00:00:36    10.1.200.2      Vlan200