Right now I'm scoping the needs and what is available.

And you aren't giving me much to work with.

However, let's look at retransmissons for a second. Just like I taught myself how to translate or search for what information I need in the output of the command I am going to do the same for Perl:

:
: some handwaving...
:
open PIPE,"netstat -s |" or die $!;
my @slurp=<PIPE>;
close PIPE;
chomp @slurp;
grep /Retran/,@slurp;
printf "%s\n",join("\n",@slurp);
:
:
[download]

    TCPLostRetransmit: 0
    TCPFastRetrans: 0
    TCPForwardRetrans: 0
    TCPSlowStartRetrans: 0
[download]

What you do beyond that depends on your requirements. I recommend you sit down and develop your requirements thoroughly and then plan your attack rather than fit your requirements to your attack. :-)

I hope this isn't homework!

I hope this isn't homework!

Rofl! I wasn't looking for code or the solution actually. I started by asking if there was a Perl module that would be able to pull netstat information. Summary information at that. I was hoping to stay away from calling netstat and grepping / pattern matching. This way I could use the same code on just about any machine running Perl.

I recommend you sit down and develop your requirements thoroughly and then plan your attack rather than fit your requirements to your attack

Understood. I wasn't sure how much Perl could do for me in this case. Calling netstat and grepping works for me. Normally I would do it with grep/sed/awk in a shell script. :-)

Normally I would do it with grep/sed/awk in a shell script.

Sure you could. Buy why? You can do that in Perl without spawning off a process for each grep/sed/awk operation I am performing. Comparision:

netstat -s | grep 'Trans' | awk '{... ehh... whatever...
[download]

just used three processes...

open PIPE... whatever...
my @line = grep 'Trans',<PIPE>; 
close PIPOE
[download]

used two. I know that is a weak example, but I hope it clarifies my position.

Plan your work... work your plan...