If the goal is any execution, you can do it on older (but still used in some places) Windows versions with COM, or if a) it's possible to construct a minimal ex

If the goal is any execution, you can do it on older (but still used in some places) Windows versions with COM, or if a) it's possible to construct a minimal executable without non-text characters, or b) there's a scripting engine that accepts non-text characters (raw, not just encoded), you could do it with a script. Off the top of my head I can't think of what else you might run in Windows, but I'm much less familiar with Linux.