This feature allows you to associate shell scripts that perform some tasks on Hudson that are manually triggered occasionally (for example, performing a release, doing copyright header check, integrating newer versions of library jars to CVS, etc.) This allows your team to run lengthy and/or recurring tasks on Hudson asynchronously. It also allows people outside your team to trigger the tasks, thereby preventing the common "we need to do XYZ but only Kohsuke knows how to do this and he's on vacation!" problem.