Oh Wise Perl Ones;
I have searched the lovely net high and low and I cannot find any perl code to split a ps aux (linux system) into an array.

I'm consulting for a small ISP that uses sendmail. We are being hammered by spammers, so I felt a perl solutions would be more than sufficient. What I'm attempting to do is monitor /var/log/messages for the hoards of "User unknown" messages resulting from name-list spam techniques. The messages log contains the pid of the sendmail process in question. I can then run a ps aux, match up the pid, and get the IP of the spammer, so that I can then add it to my firewall's block list.

This sounds like a fairly simple job for perl, however I am running into extreme difficulty splitting the ps aux into a usable format. Proc::ProcessTable is incredibly poorly documented, so it has been of little aid to this point. Here is a sample of a line from ps aux that I would need to extract the IP address from:

root     27979  0.0  0.7  1468  1008  ?  S    14:59   0:00 sendmail: s
+erver foo.bar.org [222.22.22.21] cmd read

[download]

Any suggestions for handling the ps aux and extracting the IP would be greatly appreciated!

-Jerry http://www.digilliance.net

In reply to ps aux and perl by Jerry

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