Monitoring swap space is, unfortunally, not a system independent thing. On Solaris, I'd use "swap -l", on Linux, I'd use "free". On HP, I'd use an advisor script, and probably wouldn't have a need for Perl. On Windows, I'd resign and seek employment elsewhere.

The easiest way is to use a system dependent tool, and write a wrapper around it. And I most likely use a monitoring tool, be it a free one like 'mon' or 'big brother' or a commercial one like 'openview' or 'tivoli'. Some monitoring tools will already have swap space monitoring build in. For those who don't, I'd use Perl to mangle the output of the system dependent tool into input that can be parse by the monitoring tool. Such scripts are typically 10 lines or less, but will depend highly on the used front- and back-ends.

Abigail