Enhanced ifconfig, anyone?

I would be interested to have a version of ifconfig such that the number
of bytes received and transmitted at a given interface, since the moment
that interface was brought up, are accumulated as 64-bit quantities - I
would want for those counters not to wrap around after 4 gigabytes only.

I had a quick look into the ifconfig code, and the counters above are
defined as unsigned long long - which is a 64-bit quantity in my Linux
box. The thing is, I have so far been unable to find where those counters
are updated. I thought that it would have been ifconfig itself's job to do
so, but I wonder if it just gets that info from the kernel - in which
case, doing what I want would very likely be much more tricky.

Any ideas?

I have just learnt that ifconfig gets the info on bytes received and
transmitted at a network interface from /proc/dev/net. So I guess I am
stuck with 32-bit counters on an x86 box :-(