I am trying to refactor a step in my pipeline.  Currently I have this stage:

stage('Deploy') {
 steps {
 echo 'Deploying....'
 //dir('$SQLPROJDIR\\bin\\Output') {
 bat "$SQLPACKAGE /action:publish " + 
 "/sourcefile:$SQLPROJDIR\\bin\\Output\\Vision.dacpac " + 
 "/profile:$SQLPROJDIR\\bin\\Output\\Vision.dev.publish.xml " +
 "/targetdatabasename:Vision_develop " 
 //}
}}

which works fine and runs about 5 min.  I want to factor out the directory refs by wrapping the bat call inside a dir(){}, but when I uncomment the call to dir (and the matching end brace, the deployment never finishes and I do not see any of the many messages that the deployment issues to the console.