I've also been using these types of .bat files for a short while for production rather than admin purposes. I've recently had to transfer all my print & file interfaces (written in cobol on our mainframe) to SQLServer and found that I could call these batch files from within ftp scripts. So I'd use one ftp script to move a file from one server to an sqlserver, call in the .bat script to load & process the file and then move the output to another server or printer. not only was it quicker than running the interface jobs on the mainframe (bull dps7000), it also reduced the task of importing/exporting files and issuing console commands down to one double-click of the mouse on the ftp script icon.