Ok, back to your original question then:

Personally, no. I guess to be confused, I'd have to have expectations that they were common across the board. Since I don't have that assumption, if it's something new I'll check the man page for a description and which options I want to use.

I think this has been answered a couple of times at the utility and command line switch level. In general I expect there'll be a few differences. Heck, korn shell doesn't work exactly the same between Solaris and HP-UX. I write scripts for the OS I'm most comfortable with and adjust as I get to other systems. Eventually I'm aware of the gotcha's between systems and compensate for it in my scripts with:

if [[ $OS = "SunOS" ]]
then
...
fi

I'm not writing full fledged applications. Just scripts to check for things. Logs are located in different places on systems so I have to have a OS check to see if messages is in /var/adm, /var/log, or /var/cluster/members/member2

If it's a larger script, I'll use perl which is the same across platforms and has the tools within it to mirror what the utilities do.

That's great for you. As I'm a Unix admin, I have five flavors of Unix at work and four at home not including the Cygwin installations. I have cygwin on my Windows boxes so I have similar commands across all the systems I manage.

# find / -size 10000000c -exec ls -l {} \; | sort -k2 -n | tee /tmp/report.txt

It probably can be better but that's off the top of my head.

# cd /html; tar cf - *.htm | (cd /temp/project; tar fx -)

From an advantage point of view, it's there on all the Unix platforms I manage. While the command may differ from place to place, I know the command is still "find" and not "get-childitem". If it doesn't work exactly as expected, I can refer to the man page and find the odd option.

The disadvantage is what you observed. You may have to do some searching when you go to a different system.

The disadvantage for me of learning Powershell is that it's only on Windows systems and I haven't managed Windows systems since NT 3.51. If it comes over to a Unix platform, I might take a look.

Carl