What are the advantages of Python, PowerShell, and other scripting environments?  We would like to standardize our scripting and are currently using bat and cmd files as the standard.  I think Python would be a better option than these, but am also researching PowerShell and other scripting tools.
The scripts would be used to trigger processes such as wget etc to call web services, or other applications/tools that need to run in a specific order with specific parameters.
We primarily work with the Windows stack, but there is a good chance we will need to support Unix in the future.
If all you do is spawning a lot of system specific programs with no or little programming logic behind then OS specific shell might be a better choice than a full general purpose programming language.
Python, PowerShell, or Other?