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

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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?

23 Answers
find . -name "*.pyc" -exec rm -f {} \;

find . -name '*.pyc' -delete

Surely the simplest.

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

I used to use an alias for that:

$ which pycclean

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

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

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 .

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.

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

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.

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 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

py3clean works for me!

cd /usr/local/lib/python3.9
sudo py3clean -v .
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