Personal experience with Cygwin
I spend a lot of time jumping from Windows to Linux and back again, and there have been several times when I have typed in ls -l EBAY*.jpg to get a listing of all images starting with EBAY in a given directory, only to be informed by DOS that it doesn't understand what ls is or why I'd even want to use it. It was actually after an experience using PostgreSql in Windows that I inadvertently stumbled on a solution. The PostgreSql database application was initially written for use in Linux. Rather than rewrite the application to work in Windows, the designers of PostgreSql turned to Linux software developer company Cygnus to create a Linux shell that could run within a Windows environment. When Red Hat purchased Cygnus, the Cygwin code was brought under the aegis of the Red Hat development team, which currently hosts it at Cygwin.com. Cygwin is open source and available free, and it is covered under various OS licences, though there is also a proprietary licence for companies that are looking at building their own Cygwin-based applications. The realisation of what this implies came to me when, after a longish session in Linux, I rebooted into Windows 2000 and, at a command prompt, accidentally typed the above expression. Rather than spitting out the usual "I don't understand" messages, it produced the unexpected output of a directory listing of all EBAY associated images. Mystified, I started working with some of the other Linux commands: cat output the contents of a text file (the command comes from concatenate, for its ability to combine multiple files into a single stream), mount provided a listing (in Unix format, no less) of all of my Windows directories and storage devices, pwd gave my working directory, and chmod let me change the permissions on the various files. The weirdness factor got even stronger when I typed in bash and immediately found myself in the traditional Unix bash shell. Advantages and drawbacks
Cygwin emulates most of the core Unix/Linux utility functions under Windows, making it possible to work with at least the shell-based functionality. While Xfree86 (the graphics server that acts as the foundation for graphical Linux desktops such as KDE or Gnome) can be emulated also, it is not as well supported. However, the network support applications are quite robust; you can use OpenSSH, for instance, to run scripts via the command line on any machine that has an SSH server. Also, Cygwin contains one of the fastest XSLT processors available on any platform. At the same time, Cygwin augments rather than replaces the Windows DOS-era commands, so you can open Windows applications from the command line or even mix Windows and Linux commands (though this plays havoc with the portability between systems). One drawback of Cygwin is that it does require a significant amount of hard drive space (between 25 and 60 MB, depending on what you place on the system). And because it's an emulator rather than a true Linux, the script applications won't be blazingly fast (though even on my bare-bones laptop the processing time was barely noticeable). A final drawback is that Cygwin runs as a background process (primarily to handle scheduling capabilities through cron jobs), which means that it will be a slight drain on the performance of your development systems. Add a little Cygwin to your Windows
Windows is a graphical interface, and while many of the tools can be invoked from the command line, the minimal support of the DOS command set makes that option typically unpalatable. By adding a touch of Linux to your client's Windows environment, you can consolidate scripts, minimise the hassles involved with jumping from one operating system to another, and significantly enhance what you can do with shell scripts. You'll make your clients happier and more productive in the process.