"if my question is slightly non-Perl....

No, your question is entirely non-Perl; in fact, somewhat akin to:

"I'm cooking a turkey for dinner. Please provide a synopsis of Turkish history"

As to "tons of searchs," didn't you find man proc referenced somewhere... or the documentation itself, http://linux.die.net/man/5/proc?

man proc will tell you, among other things:

/proc/pid/stat
Status information about the process. This is used by ps(1). It is defined in /usr/src/linux/fs/proc/array.c.
The fields, in order, with their proper scanf(3) format specifiers, are:
....

Update: If you don't Read The Fine Manual, you really shouldn't expect the Monks to do your reading, interpretation and coding for you. See On asking for help and How do I post a question effectively?


In reply to Re^3: (OT) Get the number of blocks per second by reading the proc diskstats file by ww
in thread (OT) Get the number of blocks per second by reading the proc diskstats file by haavard82

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.