Please add my vote for .BAT and .CMD files for at least these 2 reasons: 1) The runtime environment already exists with Windows, OS/2, DOS 2) Other team members can easily see what is going on and modify/improve the batch code Lots of samples found on web... #2 satisfies computer programming (communication) aspect: another human WILL read your code sometime and sharing early and publicly and in a way that allows more team members to empower themselves by modifying code to suit their needs seems like a better practice to me. Ex: Automated Testing; Original defect happened 1 of 4 tries manually. Root cause is somewhere in MS Win OS 64 bit networking layer behind a COM interface. So used .bat file to: run ipconfig and capture to .txt file run find to see if the expected IP address is present stop running batch file if IP not found else either Enable or Disable NIC device and reboot to try to reproduce again Since I could not fix the MS Win OS 64 bit networking code, I "hardened" the app code side with extra functionality checking even though COM interfaces reported S_OK and added a handler for recoverable errors. After incremental "hardening" the error rate went down to 1 of 1000 or more. Letting the batch file run automatically overnight and (later) over the weekend helped find even more subtle defects (places to harden) as well. Later on I used variations to do stress testing for app memory and handle leaks. Members of the Test team would also use/modify for tests. Hope this helps!