First off, cmd.exe definitely should support UNC paths. Can you provide some sample of how you're trying to use it? If you do something of the form:
That should work!
As for the second questions, -recurse is not a valid flag accepted by copy. I believe copy will just copy whole subtrees by default if you point it to a directory. But for more granular control over what happens, you should use robocopy, the much better way to copy files with the Windows CLI.
For the third piece, you can definiltey use clusrun to do some tricky deployment kinds of things! Check out this little batch script (I should update to a PowerShell version now, I guess) I wrote, which uses Clusrun and some Windows Fileshares to copy a file to all nodes in the cluster:
Code Snippet
@ECHO off
SETLOCAL
IF "%2"=="" GOTO error
REM Set local variables
SET FILE_NAME=%1
SET DEST_DIR=%2
SET APP_DIR="C:\TempAppShare"
SET SHARE_NAME=TempAppShare
REM Make a temporary directory %APP_DIR%
mkdir %APP_DIR%
copy /Y %FILE_NAME% %APP_DIR%
net share %SHARE_NAME%=%APP_DIR% /remark:"Temporary share for distribution of %FILE_NAME%" /grant:%USERDOMAIN%\%USERNAME%,READ
REM create the destination directory on the remote machine
call clusrun /all if not exist %DEST_DIR% mkdir %DEST_DIR%
REM copy the file to the remote machines
call clusrun /all copy /Y \\%COMPUTERNAME%\%SHARE_NAME%\%FILE_NAME% %DEST_DIR%\*
REM delete the file share you created
net share %SHARE_NAME% /delete
rmdir /s /q %APP_DIR%
GOTO end
:error
ECHO Usage: "Deploy Files.bat" FileName Destination
:end
ENDLOCAL
Sorry for the detayed response . . . there were some technical problems with the forums!