I wrote a pair of quickie perl/tk programs meant to monitor and control named and sendmail (for the less unix-apt in tech services). I noticed that, for a reasonable refresh rate, using backquotes is a waste of cpu time. You know, forking, spawning, context switching, blah. It also makes your PIDs wrap around faster ;) You might look into modules like Proc::ProcessTable, which will avoid using ps. Tailing a file should be cake in perl, too. Uptime... not sure on that one, but I imagine it's trivial -- a posix call that returns uptime in seconds or such. Anyway, just a tip!

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mhoward----at----hattmoward.org