System specific information gathering

Hello, I have a question on how to get Server side system specific information via PHP, or just general direction on how to parse some of the information found in /proc For example, I want to be able to display the system uptime.. number of users logged in, and load average. In the shell, I just do uptime, and it gives me all that information [vluther@terrence proc]$ uptime 00:47:42 up 15 days, 7:07, 7 users, load average: 0.44, 0.41, 0.39 Now i can always do a split on , and then based on that parse out the info, or I could cat /proc/uptime and /proc/loadavg For the number of users I can do w -h | wc -l I can call all these commands via the system() function, but my question is, is there a better way of obtaining such info ? http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.info.php doesn't seem to offer much, except for the php_uname() function. I just want to be able to display system information like uptime, on some of my web pages. Any help is appreciated.