We've used it for simple health ping scripts before in systems where bash is the only language guaranteed to be available and compiling a binary was overkill.

We've used it for simple health ping scripts before in systems where bash is the only language guaranteed to be available and compiling a binary was overkill. I've also used it to issue Redis and other text based protocol commands without having to have a large runtime or library. But in both those scenarios the environment was pretty restrictive.