Been trolling for a while; first post (be gentle). I'm 30 and am a HUGE fan of .bat. I manage a small rogue IT shop full of developers WAY smarter & more talented than I'll ever be, but once in a blue moon I stick them with a task & they fire up all sort of fancy VB & other stuff I don't understand only to end up with a program that has more lines than I want to read & is typically less reliable! Long live the DOS (ok fine... command prompt). TIP: .bat works REALLY well in SSIS packages; I assume shell does too, but I haven't found a need to venture outside my comfort zone.