Thanks for your reply, I, however went with "alter table...." option. Easier and cleaner in my opinion. Regards, Eugene Pipko Seattle Pacific Industries office: 253.872.5243 cell: 206.304.7726 P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail. From: Yechiel Adar [mailto:adar666@xxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, September 08, 2009 10:07 PM Cc: Eugene Pipko; 'Oracle L' Subject: Re: help with batch operation In the first option I forgot to write the sqlplus command between the copy and the move. Adar Yechiel Rechovot, Israel Yechiel Adar wrote: I read the replies and I assume that all the files are in the same structure as you are reading them using the same external table. You have several options: 1) If you can process the data from all the files in the same time AND have disk space you can use: copy a.txt+b.txt+c.txt target.txt move *.txt archive\*.old /Y -->move the files and rename them to old, overwrite existing files in archive. this will give you one big file, target.txt, that is concatenation of all the files and you can process that. 2) Use the for command. for %i in (*.txt) do call process_file %1 and create file call_process.cmd that do: copy %1 target.txt --> I prefer copy as the original file remains a is in case of problems, you can use rename. sqlplus whatever move %1 archive\%1 /Y --> move the file to archive directory and overwrite old file with that name exit Adar Yechiel Rechovot, Israel Eugene Pipko wrote: Hi all, Running Oracle 9.2 on Windows. I know this is Oracle forum, but it's somewhat related. This question is for those of you who run Oracle on Windows. I have several ".txt" files in a directory (all different names) and looking for the possibility to do the following using .BAT file: Take first file rename it run procedure (pass it in) move it into archive dir delete it from original dir GOTO 1 Reason I have to do all this is because in step 3 I am using external table to read the ".txt" file and it has to have a unique file name. Regards, Eugene Pipko Seattle Pacific Industries office: 253.872.5243 cell: 206.304.7726 P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.