How to get "sleep" to really sleep?

I am attempting to write a perl script that checks a status every sixty seco
nds and sleeps the rest of the time.  The problem is that when run as a scri
pt, the perl interpreter does not sleep and consumes system resources.  Even
 when I use the UNIX system call such as   system "sleep 60", or `sleep 60`,
 it makes not difference.  I have used perlcc to compile it into a binary ex
ecutable and it still does not sleep.  How is it that you can use a UNIX sys
tem "sleep" and not have the entire process sleep?

Any suggestions would be appreciated!