NT has a pretty powerful DOS batch scripting program. I'm not entirely familiar with Vista, but I suspect it still retains that capability. Here's how the Vista (and XP and Windows 2000 and NT) batch scripting will suit your needs: 1) simple 2) works in Vista 3) portable 4) not an online app 5) does not use Java It does fail miserablely in the F/OSS requirement, however - it will be proprietary to your needs. But on the upside, there are no libraries to install -- it's all built in. --------------- DOS scripting can do variable expansions, for loops of numbers, for loops of directory entries, and such. It can be configred to read in entries from flat files, and parse each line and split arrays, and such - perfect for your needs. --------------- Failing that, you can write simple Visual Basic files (.vbs files) that you can execute from the command line. These things are great, because you can use the Windows Scheduler to schedule execution of these batch files, the batch files can spawn other batch processes, kick off other jobs, etc. http://www.computerhope.com/sethlp.htm http://www.robvanderwoude.com/variableexpansion.html http://www.maem.umr.edu/batch/dadd.htm