The one advantage to a roasting pan is that you can cover it easily with foil (or a lid), which is handy for dishes with a long steamed component.  Tough roasts, for example, can be cooked low-and-slow in a roasting pan, tightly covered in foil.

Note that most restaurants do not use roasting pans.  Instead, they use standard 4 and 6 inch deep rectangular stainless pans, which can also be used for marinating, storage, and so on.  The key is the depth of the pan, which is useful if a dish needs to be covered when cooking.

What are the uses for a roasting pan? Do I really need a roasting pan?
I am looking for a command line utility (I need to use it in a script) that can set Spotlight metadata to files.
