that is expected, you are running the module X number of times, each time with exclusive (X == number of items).

Possible Misunderstanding

Hi!

Thanks very much for your submission to Ansible. It sincerely means a lot to us.

We believe the ticket you have filed is being somewhat misunderstood, as one thing works a little differently than stated.

In the future, this might be a topic more well suited for the user list, which you can also post here if you'd like some more help with the above.

• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ansible-project

Thank you once again for this and your interest in Ansible!

I've solved this by an intermediate step. Like so

# Read each file and split by newline, allowing for multiple keys per file
- name: Assemble keys
  set_fact:
    key_item: "{{ lookup('file', role_path + '/files/' + item).split('\n') }}"
  with_items:
    - bob.pub
    - fred.pub
    - barney.pub
  register: keys

# Select each key, joining it again and join all keys. Internally the ansible
# module will then split the string by newline and work at each one. This is
# the only way exclusive works with a list of keys.
- name: Distribute operations ssh-keys to root
  authorized_key:
    key        : "{{ keys.results|selectattr('ansible_facts','defined')|map(attribute='ansible_facts.key_item')|map('join', '\n')|join('\n') }}"
    manage_dir : yes
    state      : present
    user       : root
    exclusive  : yes