Quite a few times one or the other of my automation shell scripts got hang while running some external command (e.g. a remote shell command may hang if network is in weird state). For those cases where a stopped automation script could really hurt the system, I ended up writing a script wrapper that add a timeout to any command.
This is kind of heavy weight implementation: instead of running the command directly, this start a first process sleeping for the duration of the timeout, and execute the command in a background process, and finally return the result of the first finishing process! 3 processes: 1 working, 1 sleeping, 1 waiting ... but it helped me few times!
Gisty code