One of Perl's cooler selling points is being able to substitute for programs like cut, grep, uniq, and sort by using native Perl functions.

I've rewritten what you have a little (the output is different, but I think I get the gist of what you're trying to do) so that the only shell is for the netstat command.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

my %adapter_names = ();
for (split /\n/, `netstat -i`)  {
  next if /lo|sit|link|Name/;
  /(\S+)/;  # Takes first block of non-spaces, assigns to $1
  my $interface = $1;
  my $adapter = $interface;
  $adapter =~ s/^en/ent/;  # Add other substitutions here
  $adapter_names{$adapter} = $interface if !defined $adapter_names{$ad
+apter};
}
print "$_ : $adapter_names{$_}\n" for sort keys %adapter_names;
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