Grep Equivalent for Python

[tereglow]

Hello all,

I come from a shell/perl background and have just to learn python.  To
start with, I'm trying to obtain system information from a Linux
server using the /proc FS.  For example, in order to obtain the amount
of physical memory on the server, I would do the following in shell:

grep ^MemTotal /proc/meminfo | awk '{print $2}'

That would get me the exact number that I need.  Now, I'm trying to do
this in python.  Here is where I have gotten so far:

memFile = open('/proc/meminfo')
for line in memFile.readlines():
    print re.search('MemTotal', line)
memFile.close()

I guess what I'm trying to logically do is... read through the file
line by line, grab the pattern I want and assign that to a variable.
The above doesn't really work, it comes back with something like
"<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xb7f9d6b0>" when a match is found.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
Tom