I saw this trick with dd mentioned before on the usenet. Maybe there is a perl equivalent?

# On an x86, the BIOS is traditionally accessible in the 
# last 64K of the first megabyte of
# memory.  So, start at byte 0 of RAM.  Skip 992K.  
# Read 32K and dump it to stdout."

dd if=/dev/mem bs=32k skip=31 count=1 | strings -n 10 | grep -i 'asser
+t tag'
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