No worries at all. FWIW, in the project I work on (http://github.com/newrelic/rpm) we definitely do these type of things, but you just have to be cautious about the failure cases and what different OS's report. Here's an example (though not quite what you're looking for) that shows how far you've got to go sometimes: https://github.com/newrelic/rpm/blob/master/lib/new_relic/agent/samplers/memory_sampler.rb

Wonder if there's a good gem out there that wraps any of it up in a way we could leverage instead of hand-coding it too?