Are there any references I can look up for to interprete "netstat -s", especially those on TCP statistics.

I don't understand your questions... What do you want to interpret? Do you want a more user-friendly listing from netstat? Do you want more information on a specific stat?

Sorry for not posing my question clearly.

I wish to know the meaning of individual statistics output by "netstat -s".

Well, it's very hard to explain them all if you don't understand TCP/IP. They show stuff that isn't too useful unless you're looking for something specific, or troubleshooting a network bug. Look for a primer on the TCP/IP protocol if you want to understand the output of `netstat -s`.

I am trying to check on whether file descriptors has been exhausted. Which statistic should I refer to for this ?

If a process is trying to open up a socket, and the file description limit has exceeded, will there be any error log shown (eg in /var/adm/message) ?

Example output of netstat -s:

[quote]
athlon# netstat -s
Ip:
461270 total packets received
0 forwarded
0 incoming packets discarded
288 incoming packets delivered
374553 requests sent out
8 dropped because of missing route
Icmp:
29 ICMP messages received
0 input ICMP message failed.
ICMP input histogram:
destination unreachable: 29
899 ICMP messages sent
0 ICMP messages failed
ICMP output histogram:
destination unreachable: 899
Tcp:
34 active connections openings
0 passive connection openings
0 failed connection attempts
0 connection resets received
1 connections established
460013 segments received
373502 segments send out
993 segments retransmited
0 bad segments received.
2 resets sent
Udp:
123 packets received
32 packets to unknown port received.
0 packet receive errors
152 packets sent
TcpExt:
[/code]

There is nothing here that discusses file descriptors. This simply provides statistics about sockets, packets, tcp segments, and connections.

This command is not used to check for file descriptor usage.

thnx Neo
I was just trying to check if there is any failed connections, perhaps due to fd exhausted.