how do you write a program to determine free swap (like pstat -s)

[Gregory R. Simpson @ The North Coast]

Hello, the Subject line pretty much sums it up. I'm using a
network of DecStation 3100's and DecStation 5000's to do
ray tracing simulations that are very memory intensive.
I automatically parallel process the job across the entire
network, but in order to do so I have to:

rsh node /etc/pstat -s | tail -1 | awk ...

on all my nodes to determine if there is enough virtual
memory available on the machine to kick off the job...

I'd like to write a simple vm_check program that returns
nothing except the amount of swap remaining... (which is
all I'm interested in...

I tried man -k mem, swap, get, and I scrolled through
xman with no success...

Any hints, code segements, include files to look
at etc. would be appreciated...

Thanks,

Greg


-- 
Gregory R. Simpson
GE Lighting  (216)-266-6506

simpsong at ltd.ge.com
or 
uunet!crd.ge.com!ltd.decnet!simpsong