get output of du / ls command - currently ugly code ...

[Esmail]

Hi all,

Essentially all I want to know the size of a directory, and the size
of a zipped tarball so that I can compute/report the compression ratio.

The code I have seems hideous, but it seems to work. Surely there is an
easier,more elegant way to do this?

     dir_size = os.popen('du -sk somename')
     data = dir_size.readlines()
     dir_size = int(data[0].split()[0])
     print 'dir size: ', dir_size

     tar_size = os.popen('ls -s somename.tar.gz')
     data = tar_size.readlines()
     tar_size = int(data[0].split()[0])
     print 'tar size: ', tar_size

Thanks
Esmail