I like to keep my workspace clean and one thing that I don’t personally love looking at is the __pycache__ directory that pops up after running some code.
The *.pyc files that show up there are python bytecode and they are cached to make subsequent runs a tad faster.
My stuff never really needs this bonus speed boost and so I came across a neat tool called pyclean!
Pyclean #
The easiest way (in my opinion) to run pyclean is to just use pipx run.
sandbox/src 🌱 main 🗑️ ×3🛤️ ×2via 🐍 v3.8.11 (sandbox) took 9s
❯ ls
abcmeta.py __pycache__ python-print-align.py system-monitor-psutils.py
sandbox/src 🌱 main 🗑️ ×3🛤️ ×2via 🐍 v3.8.11 (sandbox)
❯ pipx run pyclean .
⚠️ pyclean is already on your PATH and installed at /usr/bin/pyclean. Downloading and running anyway.
Cleaning directory .
Total 1 files, 1 directories removed.
sandbox/src 🌱 main 🗑️ ×3🛤️ ×2via 🐍 v3.8.11 (sandbox)
❯ ls
abcmeta.py python-print-align.py system-monitor-psutils.py
Why not bash? #
You could accomplish something similar with rm **/*.pyc or find -n '*.py?' -delete but there’s a chance you’ll find something you don’t love gone.
Also this won’t help our poor Windows friends out there!
pyclean is fully python so it’s OS independent.