[bash] How do I remove all .pyc files from a project?

I've renamed some files in a fairly large project and want to remove the .pyc files they've left behind. I tried the bash script:

 rm -r *.pyc

But that doesn't recurse through the folders as I thought it would. What am I doing wrong?

find . -name '*.pyc' -print0 | xargs -0 rm

The find recursively looks for *.pyc files. The xargs takes that list of names and sends it to rm. The -print0 and the -0 tell the two commands to seperate the filenames with null characters. This allows it to work correctly on file names containing spaces, and even a file name containing a new line.

The solution with -exec works, but it spins up a new copy of rm for every file. On a slow system or with a great many files, that'll take too long.

You could also add a couple more args:

find . -iname '*.pyc' -print0 | xargs -0 --no-run-if-empty  rm

iname adds case insensitivity, like *.PYC . The no-run-if-empty keeps you from getting an error from rm if you have no such files.

Now there is a package pyclean on PyPI, which is easy to use, and cross-platform. User just need a simple command line to clean all __pycache__ files in current dir:

pyclean .

To delete all the python compiled files in current directory.

find . -name "__pycache__"|xargs rm -rf
find . -name "*.pyc"|xargs rm -rf

If you want to delete all the .pyc files from the project folder.

First, you have

cd <path/to/the/folder>

then find all the .pyc file and delete.

find . -name \*.pyc -delete

Django Extension

Note: This answer is very specific to Django project that have already been using Django Extension.

python manage.py clean_pyc

The implementation can be viewed in its source code.

full recursive

ll **/**/*.pyc
rm **/**/*.pyc

For windows users:

del /S *.pyc

Just to throw another variant into the mix, you can also use backquotes like this:

rm `find . -name *.pyc`

if you don't want .pyc anymore you can use this single line in a terminal:

export PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=1

if you change your mind:

unset PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE

If you want remove all *.pyc files and __pycache__ directories recursively in the current directory:

• with python:

import os

os.popen('find . | grep -E "(__pycache__|\.pyc|\.pyo$)" | xargs rm -rf')

• or manually with terminal or cmd:

find . | grep -E "(__pycache__|\.pyc|\.pyo$)" | xargs rm -rf

You can run find . -name "*.pyc" -type f -delete.

But use it with precaution. Run first find . -name "*.pyc" -type f to see exactly which files you will remove.

In addition, make sure that -delete is the last argument in your command. If you put it before the -name *.pyc argument, it will delete everything.

I used to use an alias for that:

$ which pycclean

pycclean is aliased to `find . -name "*.pyc" | xargs -I {} rm -v "{}"'

rm -r recurses into directories, but only the directories you give to rm. It will also delete those directories. One solution is:

for i in $( find . -name *.pyc )
do
  rm $i
done

find will find all *.pyc files recursively in the current directory, and the for loop will iterate through the list of files found, removing each one.

find . -name '*.pyc' -delete

Surely the simplest.

Further, people usually want to remove all *.pyc, *.pyo files and __pycache__ directories recursively in the current directory.

Command:

find . | grep -E "(__pycache__|\.pyc|\.pyo$)" | xargs rm -rf

In current version of debian you have pyclean script which is in python-minimal package.

Usage is simple:

pyclean .

First run:

find . -type f -name "*.py[c|o]" -exec rm -f {} +

Then add:

export PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=1

To ~/.profile

find . -name "*.pyc"|xargs rm -rf

If you're using bash >=4.0 (or zsh)

rm **/*.pyc

Note that */*.pyc selects all .pyc files in the immediate first-level subdirectories while **/*.pyc recursively scans the whole directory tree. As an example, foo/bar/qux.pyc will be deleted by rm **/*.pyc but not by */*.pyc.

The globstar shell options must be enabled. To enable globstar:

shopt -s globstar

and to check its status:

shopt globstar

$ find . -name '*.pyc' -delete

This is faster than

$ find . -name "*.pyc" -exec rm -rf {} \;

Add to your ~/.bashrc:

pyclean () {
        find . -type f -name "*.py[co]" -delete
        find . -type d -name "__pycache__" -delete
}

This removes all .pyc and .pyo files, and __pycache__ directories. It's also very fast.

Usage is simply:

$ cd /path/to/directory
$ pyclean