BSD::Sysctl offers a native Perl interface for fetching sysctl values that describe the kernel state of BSD-like operating systems. This is around 80 times faster than scraping the output of the sysctl(8) program. This module handles the conversion of symbolic sysctl variable names to the internal numeric format, and this information, along with the details of how to format the results, are cached. Hence, the first call to sysctl requires three system calls, however, subsequent calls require only one call. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/BSD-Sysctl/