“Powershell is your bash” — Cmd.exe is your bash. Powershell doesn’t process text streams, it operates on .NET CLR objects. PowerShell by itself is more like interactive python shell. But it’s power isn’t language or interpreter, but the amount of things exposed to that language.<p>“WMI is your &#x2F;proc” — also ifconfig, &#x2F;var&#x2F;log, &#x2F;etc&#x2F;fstab, &#x2F;etc&#x2F;network&#x2F;interfaces, and a lot more, and with remote access.<p>“VBScript and group policy would be things you come across if you work with Samba” — completely unrelated. VBScript is more or less your Perl, but again with lots of things exposed to the language (besides WMI, there are ADSI, CDO, etc).<p>AFAIK there’s nothing in *nix world resembling group policy.<p>“most unix admins know of those things” — you see? Most unix admins know almost nothing of those things. So why do you expect a Windows admin should know about nmap? On Windows, people usually use other tools instead of nmap, e.g. netstat, portqry, and tcpview.