Subprocess puzzle and two questions

[wrw at mac.com]

I need to time the operation of a command-line utility (specifically nslookup) from within a python program I'm writing.  I don't want to use python's timeit function because I'd like to avoid python's subprocess creation overhead.  That leads me to the standard UNIX time function.  So for example, in my bash shell, if I enter:

	$ time nslookup www.es.net 8.8.4.4

I get:

	Server:	 	8.8.4.4
	Address:	8.8.4.4#53

	Non-authoritative answer:
	www.es.net	canonical name = www3.es.net.
	Name:	www3.es.net
	Address: 128.55.22.201

	 real	0m0.069s
	 user	0m0.006s
	 sys	0m0.004s 

The first lines are the result of an nslookup of the IP address of "www.es.net" using the server at 8.8.4.4 (Google's public DNS server b).
The last three lines are what I'm after: the real elapsed wall-clock time, the time spent in user space and the time spent in kernel space.

However, if I try the same operation in the python interpreter using subprocess.Popen like so:

>>> import subprocess
>>> result = subprocess.Popen(['time', 'nslookup', 'www.es.net', '8.8.4.4'], shell = False, stdout = subprocess.PIPE, stderr = subprocess.PIPE).communicate()
>>> print result
('Server:\t\t8.8.4.4\nAddress:\t8.8.4.4#53\n\nNon-authoritative answer:\nwww.es.net\tcanonical name = www3.es.net.\nName:\twww3.es.net\nAddress: 128.55.22.201\n\n', '        0.06 real         0.00 user         0.00 sys\n')

And the timing information I'm after has been truncated to two digits after the decimal.  It appears that Popen is applying a default format. If I do explicit formatting:

>>> time = result[1].lstrip().split(' ')[0]
>>> formatted_time = '{: >7.3f}'.format(float(time))
>>> print formatted_time
  0.060

I get three digits, BUT that third digit isn't real, the format operation has simply appended a zero.  So:

1) how can I recover that third digit from the subprocess?
2) is there a more pythonic way to do what I'm trying to do?

python 2.7, OS-X 10.8.2

Thanks in advance -
Bill Wing