Programming

i am currently using c functions such as getprocs and statsfs to obtain process information and filesystem information on machines running aix 4.3.3.0. (soon to be running aix5.1) is there a function available to access information similar to the information provided by a vmstat command? i also need to know how to do similar monitoring on sun and linux machines. is there somewhere i could go to learn more about these system monitoring tools? any help would be appreciated. thanks unix gurus!!

-smitty

I don't know aix, but I can make some general comments. vmstat works by reading a kernel data structure twice but exactly one second apart. Then it figures out what happened during that second. Some versions of unix get use a pseudo driver called /dev/mem and get the data from there. There sometimes is a special system to get the data. vmstat has a particular problem because it must zero out a structure to implement the -z option.

There are various "free" versions of unix on the web, complete with source code. You can download a couple of versions of the vmstat source to look at.

But my advice is: don't do this. Invoke the system vmstat program and parse the output. Your code will be easier to maintain and much more portable if you do.