Getting back to a pure Perl solution, and I certainly don't want to get into a Perl golf match with Randal, but the whole substr approach is very specific to the formatting of vm_stat output, and as the OP pointed out, this changes between releases.

It can be accomplished more generally using the default autosplitting on whitespace:

vm_stat 2 | perl -ane 'printf "%.2d:%.2d:%.2d: @F[0..4]\n", (localtime())[2,1,0]'

Additional columns can be added by simply specifying more indices to the @F array, i.e., @F[0..4,6,9]

As in Hal's example, additional formatting can be added if desired:

vm_stat 2 | perl -ane 'printf "%.2d:%.2d:%.2d: %9s %9s %9s %9s\n", (localtime())[2,1,0], @F[0..4]'

This solution has the advantage over the awk (though not gawk) methods by not having to shell out to get the `date`

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Interesting, it previewed/looked fine under Firefox, but I see your issue under Safari. Lets hope this fixes it. My apologies.

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