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I wonder if it's possible in puppet (windows agent) for a variable to hold the value of a file name, then add this variable value to an exec windows cmd.exe command? i.e. I'm trying to copy a file from a shared drive to c:\temp like this:

$setup_msi = "myprogram.msi"
exec { 'copy_MSI_c:\temp': 
command => 'C:\\windows\system32\cmd.exe /c "copy i:\\data\\${setup_msi}" c:\\temp'
But when the windows puppet agent runs, puppet parses the $setup_msi variable name itself and not the value that said variable contains. I was hoping it would parse it like this: C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /c "copy i:\data\myprogram.msi c:\temp"
Any help would be greattly appreciated.
Thanks.
Fr3edom21.
The command string is containted within single quote marks and this is why the variable is not substitiuted.
Your code should be
$setup_msi = "myprogram.msi"
exec { 'copy_MSI_c:\temp': 
    command => "C:\\windows\system32\cmd.exe /c \"copy i:\\data\\${setup_msi} c:\\temp\""
Since usage of double quotation marks means that the string itself is going to be parsed by puppet, it is also necessary to escape any double quotes within that string, thus \"copy instead of "copy.
Hope this helps.
                Thanks Mateusz, but it didn't work:   Warning: Unrecognised escape sequence '\c' in file /etc/puppet/environments/production/blah../blah...
– SuperVertrix
                Mar 25, 2015 at 19:45
                I updated the answer, both of you were closing the quotations around cmd.exe /c before you added the copy to location (c:\temp).  So it will likely work better if the command you are trying to pass will actually execute outside of Puppet. ;)
– ferventcoder
                Mar 25, 2015 at 21:56
After spending too much time on getting this to work, I found a workaround like this:
$setup_msi = "i:\\data\\myprogram.msi"
    exec { 'copy_MSI_c:\temp':
        command => "C:\\windows\\system32\\cmd.exe /c copy ${setup_msi} c:\\temp",
        
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