Yep, I showed him how to print a variable to get it's value, and I showed him -c and -d. Thing is, I only gave him the overview. Assuming there's a second lecture (sermon? Nahhh, let's not pursue the Monk metaphor), I'll need to pick one thing and go into it in more depth. At this point, I'm leaning towards helping him write a simple script to parse netstat into name=value pairs and either writing the data to a logfile, mailing it somewhere, or posting it to a web page.

One thing I addressed, independent of perl syntax, was that tools should have similar interfaces, reporting mechanisms and output formats. That way, an eventual toolsuite can grow without having to reinvent the wheel, and the code is more maintainable.

-Logan
"What do I want? I'm an American. I want more."