in reply to Running a command in Perl

Why not use Proc::ProcessTable:

$ cat mem.pl use 5.12.1; use warnings; use Data::Peek; use Proc::ProcessTable; my $s; $s += $_->{size} for grep { $_->cmndline =~ /java/ } @{Proc::ProcessTa +ble->new->table}; say $s; $ perl mem.pl 27656867840

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn