when I was working on the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), we got to use wbemtest quite a lot. Especially the root/cimv2 namspace was good to get information about system hardware.

These days if someone asks me (on a windows machine about how many RAM slots it has, etc., I can look it up in wbemtest quick enough.

Call me stupid, but I never knew what the Linux equivalent was - considering Linux addresses everything as a file it was exceedingly straightforward

read bv < /sys/class/sound/card0/device/modalias

echo $bv

or

read bv < /sys/class/dmi/id/bios_version

echo $bv