Batch Files, Command Lines
Bradley Schacht is a Principal Program Manager on the Microsoft Fabric product team based in Saint Augustine, FL. Bradley is a former consultant, trainer, and has coauthored 6 SQL Server and Power BI books, most recently Learn Microsoft Fabric. As a member of the Microsoft Fabric product team, Bradley works directly with customers to solve some of their most complex data problems and helps shape the future of Microsoft Fabric. Bradley gives back to the community through speaking at events such as the SQLBits, Fabric Community Conference, PASS Community Data Summit, SQL Saturdays, Code Camps, and user groups across the country including locally at the Jacksonville SQL Server User Group (JSSUG). He is a contributor on SQLServerCentral.com and blogs on his personal site, BradleySchacht.com.
After some diligent use of a wonderful free tool, www.google.com, I came across something that was easily the niftiest thing I have discovered in quite a while. There is a command that you can use to map any network location to a drive letter: pushd {NetwrokLocation}. The cool part is that you don’t even have to know what drive letters are not taken up. It will start with Z and work its way backward through the alphabet to find an available drive letter. The other side of that is popd {MappedDriveLetter} to release that mapping. But that isn’t even required because as soon as the session is finished the mapping is released anyway. So now I can map PWBradSSIS to a drive letter and use it in a batch file! The advantage of this is the following piece of code does not work: CD PWBradSSIS FTP -i -s:FTPDownload.script But this will work: pushd PWBradSSIS FTP -i -s:FTPDownload.script This is a great way to be able to use network locations in your batch files and in execute process tasks. When you do this can use all the regular commands just like any other location. Give it a try. Map a location with pushd NetworkLocationHere and then navigate around using the cd command or get the directory contents with a simple little dir. The next screen shot will give you a short visual of how to use the commands. 
Issue Number 2: Making your batch files configurable We will cover this in another blog posting for tomorrow. Let’s not get too carried away. I’m sure you want to go play with pushd and popd now anyway. Have fun and please let me know if this is helpful to you or useful to you in any way, shape or form. Check back tomorrow for part two: Configurability.