parse problems

[Ronald J. Yacketta]

Folks,

I am working on some system statistical gathering/plotting scripts
for our E5500 boxes and a couple linux boxes.

I am looking to gather some vmstat info from our linux boxes and
parse out certain data and do some calculations to get some data
to be plotted.

Here is what I have so far (rough stab, very early stages)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use Getopt::Long;
use Time::Local;
use strict;
my $x;
my @output;
$| = 1;
        @output = qx(vmstat 5 2 );
        shift @output;
        shift @output;
        print "Total lines: " . @output . "\n";

# 1  0  0   1896   3836  28936  83252   0   0     3    16    9     3   5  24
20
# 1  0  0   1896   3836  28936  83252   0   0     3    16    9     3   5  24
20

        for (@output) {
                chomp $_;
                my ($IOBO) = unpack "A2", $_;
                print $IOBO;
        }



I started right I hope ;) -w, strict etc..
my problem is this, I am taking 2 snaps of vmstat and putting them into
@output,
I need to parse @output and pull columns 11,13,14 and 16 out of the vmstat
data.

I initially thought of using unpack, but for some odd reason I could never
get it right
with exception to unpack A* ;)

Could someone lend a guiding hand on this minor parse issue?


Regards,
Ron