Question

I am doing backups in python script but i need to get the size of tar.gz file created in MB

How can i get the size in MB of that file

Answer 1

It’s not clear from your question whether you want to the compressed or uncompressed size of the file, but in the former case, it’s easy with the os.path.getsize function from the os module

>>> import os
>>> os.path.getsize('flickrapi-1.2.tar.gz')
35382L

To get the answer in megabytes you can shift the answer right by 20, e.g.

os.path.getsize('large.tar.gz') >> 20

Although that operation will be done in integers – if you want to preserve fractions of a megabyte, divide by (1024*1024.0) instead. (Note the .0 so that the divisor will be a float.)

Update: In the comments below, Johnsyweb points out a useful recipe for more generally producing human readable representations of file sizes.