DOSCMD recursive COPY NUL fails with exit code 104

[philip]

I have a step in a build that does:
%DOSCMD% FOR /R D:\directory /D %%f IN (*.*) DO COPY NUL %%f\Vers_081.txt

This is intended to create a 0-byte placeholder file in each subdirectory in the path. If I run the command (without the %DOSCMD% and changing the %%f to %f) from a DOS prompt, it works correctly.

When this is run in Visual Build, it fails with an error:
Process completed with exit code 104
although it appears to create all the placeholder files correctly. If I change the "COPY NUL" to "ECHO. > ", it still fails in Visual Build with the same message and exit code (but again, it does create the files).

This is version 5.0 of Visual Build (licensed) running on Windows NT4 SP6a.