Cobbler+Kickstart $basearch problems

I'm using CentOS 6.5 with Cobbler 2.4 (from EPEL). I'm trying to use a heredoc comment to create a repo file (which works) without the $basearch being interpreted. What happens is the file is created except $basearch is replaced with nothing (e.g. it's removed). What I have: %post #raw cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/blah.repo <http://repo.local/repo/$basearch enabled=1 priority=99 gpgcheck=0 REPO #end raw %end What actually gets put in /etc/yum.repos.d/blah.repo ($basearch is missing): [repo] name=repo baseurl=http://repo.local/repo/ enabled=1 priority=99 gpgcheck=0 Things I have have verified: - I know it's not Cobbler or Cheetah because cobbler validateks and cobbler profile getks ... reports back to me the kickstart script unmodified (when using #raw and #end raw. - I created a sample of the template within Cheetah and it properly showed the un-escaped string. I was doing some further research and found this , from the first bullet it looks like $basearch is a special variable within kickstart. Are there any suggestions on how to get around this without using curl to get the file or explicitly defining the architecture? I want to keep this within the kickstart file for simplicity sake.