[t43562]

e.g. Starting something in the background and having to stick sleep statements into the script to wait till it is ready to receive requests on whatever port it uses. The sleeps are fine on one machine and on another they aren't enough.

Stashing the PID somewhere and writing code to use the PID to work out if the process is still running and hasn't crashed so you can report a status on it. It's just a waste of one's own time doing this repeatedly and there are ways to do it badly. Every initscript repeated the work.

You could probably do something quite good with bash if you provided a library of functions and demanded that scripts be written to use them.

[bandrami]

Was I the only person that used inetd to bring up their services on demand? I could have sworn it was popular at the time.