There's an enormous amount of stuff available via sysctl(). It is essentially a huge, hierarchically extensible, system call API that passes (usually, but not

There's an enormous amount of stuff available via sysctl(). It is essentially a huge, hierarchically extensible, system call API that passes (usually, but not always) machine-readable data to programs. The sysctl(3) manual page has a lot of stuff, but it doesn't cover anywhere near everything. All of the transmit/receive statistics for the second Ethernet interface on one of my machines are various numeric values under dev.bge.1.stats , for example. The machine-readable process table record structure is given as a C language structure, struct kinfo_proc, in the <sys/user.h> header.