getting info on remote files

[gabriel.altay at gmail.com]

hello everyone,

Im trying to write some python code that will return information (file
size, last modified ...) about files on a remote computer that I have
'no password' ssh access to.  Ive been able to write code that logs on
to remote computers and I can issue a command using,

os.system(ssh blah.blah.blah.org "ls -l myfile")

but how do I store the information returned by the ls command into a
variable.  The primary goal of this is to
1. check file size on remote computer
2. scp file to local computer
3. make sure file size of copy and original are the same

any suggestions would be appreciated

thanks
gabe