Looks like a <pre> tag was left open above.
I'll attempt to close it...
The script I wrote is configurable as to what ftp server and what directory to check. It defaults to checking updates.redhat.com /version-num/i386 (so, for a 6.2 box, it would check /6.2/i386), which contains both both security and enhancements.
I wrote it as an afternoon project. I was unaware of the perl package referenced above (until reading this thread again today). My script is pure Tcl, so it should be easily customized by folks here. It uses the Tcl Standard Library ver 0.8 (available at dev.scriptics.com), which I believe requires Tcl 8.2 or greater(?). (I use Tcl 8.3.2 since that's what AOLserver 3.x has internally.)
I've thrown the script up at http://michael.cleverly.com/aolserver/emdia. The name, EmDia is a Portuguese idiom for "current" or "up-to-date". Running emdia -? will give you a list of all the command line options & their default values.
