RAM usage for webadmin

Question

I would like to know RAM usage. I know there are several commands like free, top, but how can i get only the number in MB's like "3172", so i can use it in my webadmin script?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Assuming from the given commands you mean shell commands:

Depending on which value you want you can use something like

free -m | awk '/^-/ {print $4}'

The regex between the two / selects the line you want (here it's the one starting with -), the number after the $ denotes the field you want (here it's the 4th).

Answer 2

free gets its information from the special file /proc/meminfo. I'm not that good at Python, but I guess you can read the "file" line by line and split it on :.