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;

[download]

In reply to Re: Simple hash assignment...or is it? by delirium
in thread Simple hash assignment...or is it? by arootbeer

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.