My free command shows the following lines:

       total    used  free shared  buffers  cached
Mem:  189656  180144  9512      0     6976   81012
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First, use backticks to execute a command; it stores the output in an array, every line is an element. The output contains newlines, which are annoying. They can be stripped using chomp:

   my @lines = `free`; # run command, store output
   chomp (@lines);     # remove all newlines.
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Next, we want to store the names of all fields of the second line by using split. The order is used later, so we use an array.

my @field_names = split (' ', $lines[0]); # split 1st line
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The second line contains the memory numbers. We could use split to get the different elements, but to make it more interesting, we use regular expressions, marked by the =~:

my @mem_sizes = ( $lines[1] =~ m/(\d+)/g );
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This line says: scan line 2 for matches of one or more digits (\d+). The parentheses around the digit remembers the found number. The 'g' repeats the process, and an array of found numbers is returned.

So now we have one array with numbers, and one array with the corresponding field names. Whenever you see 'corresponding' like this, you should think of a hash. Let's create one:

my %free; # a hash, where the fields will get stored
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Now comes the magic:

@free { @field_names } = @mem_sizes;
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Now, we can use the data by the field names instead of by their index, which will be easier to understand:

print("Cached: ", $free{'cached'}, "\n");
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As an excercise left to the reader: in the line

@free { @field_names } = @mem_sizes;
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why does it say @free, and not $free?