Thanks for pointing out the snippet! I looked through it quickly and it gave me some good ideas.

I'm looking at writing code to parse the summary information actually. netstat -s provides summary information about ICMP, TCP, UDP and so on. I'm interested in capturing infomation such as dropped packets and errors. I was hoping to stay within Perl and not externally call netstat.

For example, instead of calling date I would use Perl's localtime. I was hoping there was a module for Perl that would gather the netstat summary (netstat -s equivalent).