I disagree. 1. Unix-like environments are (or rather were before systemd) kinda similar and once you drop a shell - good to go. Even with powershell Microsoft have gone down the route of version/feature pinning. If you plan to maintain at least Windows 7/Server 2003 in your scripts - well, powershell 2 is the highest you can aim, bye bye new features, welcome bloat. Red Hat while shipping old versions still backports features. 2. The only thing in Unix-likes being standard are core utils and OpenSSH. Everything else can be anything (SysV/upstart/Systemd, Gnome/KDE/tiny_tiling_wm, bash/zsh) and we are actually deprecating older technologies for new ones (quite often changing the name). Due to ELTS (extremely long term support, often called legacy cruft) core subsystems are mostly the same (on the outside) in Windows. And if it is a server you can bet it is running IIS and MSSQL. 3. Try using `wmic` shell or `net` util. Unbearable clunkiness of such tools and bearable GUI tools mean that we have very little general scripts/tools to transfer