Thanks for posting Eric. I'll preface this by saying that I am not meaning to picking on you personally so please do not take it that way. I am picking on the generic scenario which I have a suspicion is probably very common and it goes straight to my point. If someone is tasked with doing something in the host OS'es file system then why do they not have direct access to make those changes in the context of their own account? The person not having access with their own account means someone who controls access in the environment either has not thought to grant those permissions, the DBA has not bothered to ask for those permissions to be granted either for fear of being shot down or because they already found an alternate way to do it without asking, or in the worst case they should not have the permissions at all and yet they gain access via xp_cmdshell. In any case there is a broken process somewhere or someone has violated an access rule, or both.

I have to do these types of tasks as well but I'll either access the server file system over the network via UNC, or I'll RDP to the server to make the file system changes locally. If and when I get around to it I am thinking of exploring Remote PowerShell which would effectively give me a PoSh prompt on my own machine that would actually be running commands on the remote server. Don Jones and Jeffrey Hicks compare Remote PoSh to a telnet session, except routed over HTTP/S which is easier to get routed than telnet these days, and with a PowerShell session instead of a DOS session on the remote computer. In any case, I want to, and I want others to as well, be making the changes under my own security context.