paramiko Python module to read result of ncdu command in linux

Question

I was trying to write a simple code in Python using paramiko to retrieve the disk space usage of a remote directory using the ncdu command. But ncdu does not seems to be working with paramiko . ncdu uses ncurses . Can anyone help me provide a work-around for it?

ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()
ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())
ssh.connect('xxxx', username='root', password='xxxx')
dom="xxxx"
stdin, stdout, stderr = ssh.exec_command('/scripts/whoowns %s' %dom)
test=(stdout.readlines())
new=test[0].strip()
stdin, stdout, stderr = ssh.exec_command('ncdu -q  /home/%s/public_html/' %new)
print (stdout);
ssh.close()

Answer 1

Use the "more primitive" command:

du -hs /directory/ 

To retrieve the dimension of the directory.

-s Instead of the default output, report only the total sum for each of the specified files.
-h print sizes in human readable format (eg, 1K 234M 2G)

Link to man page here .

Answer 2

According to the manual NCDU has an -o flag allowing you to output to a file or STDOUT:

-o FILE
           Export all necessary information to FILE instead of opening the browser interface. If FILE is "-", the
           data is written to standard output.  See the examples section below for some handy use cases.

           Be warned that the exported data may grow quite large when exporting a directory with many files. 10.000
           files will get you an export in the order of 600 to 700 KiB uncompressed, or a little over 100 KiB when
           compressed with gzip. This scales linearly, so be prepared to handle a few tens of megabytes when
           dealing with millions of files.

Its output will look like this:

[1,0,{"progname":"ncdu","progver":"1.10","timestamp":1425971095},
[{"name":"/var /lib/colord","asize":4096,"dsize":4096,"dev":2049,"ino":524803},
{"name":"storage.db","asize":7168,"dsize":8192,"ino":532806},
[{"name":"icc","asize":4096,"dsize":4096,"ino":524911}],
 {"name":"mapping.db","asize":4096,"dsize":4096,"ino":532801}]]%

Unlike the ncurses output of ncdu this does not group directories together unfortunately, this has to be done by your script.