CosmicTrickster: That's a good point, and is probably acceptable for environments that don't require extremely high security. Still, one would want to make sure that the command being executed can't get stuck - e.g. take a long time to complete for whatever reason. Such a job should then probably be monitored to ensure the xp_cmdshell is disabled again - maybe even with a separate job that runs regardless and disable xp_cmdshell at a given time.

One should also make sure that the file executed through xp_cmdshell can't be easily replaced with a rogue binary by an unauthorized user, but that would apply to any batch job really.

If it's just about inserting some string into a table, then I wonder if it's not more efficient to just write a script that executes whichever utility, and then just adds the row to the table via OLEDB/ODBC/etc.