Alvaro M. used to work as a contractor for large US store chain where many things were accomplished via shell scripts. The majority of which were written by one guy who was the "expert" on scripting - a veritable scripting guru.

Scripts doing infinite loops and then sleeping for an hour were often the norm. The reasoning behind these being that "cron used too much server resources!" There was even a server where every user was allowed to put their scripts, that was painfully slow to use, partially because at any time you could see a couple hundred instances of 'sleep'...for example: 

i=1
while [ $i = 1 ]; do
    JOB_LIST=`ps -ef | grep some_process | wc -l`
    if [ $JOB_LIST -ne 1 ]; then
        echo Warning message
    fi
    sleep 3600
done
[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!