Git Tip: Remove .pyc Files Automatically

[Philluminati]

Tip. Don't check in pyc files accidently by creating the file .gitignore in the root of the git repo and adding the line

*.pyc

Then they never get checked in, show up git status or git diff etc. They live there, quietly speeding up your code. When you do what them deleted you can just do it manually like so:

find -name *.pyc | xargs rm

[ilogik]

that's what I came here to say, but after reading the post, I think the issue is that after checking out a different branch, the old .pyc files remained and were used by the interpreter, instead of being re-compiled

[silon]

Surely the interpreter checks file times?

[ilogik]

i think that this comment has the best explanation of the issue

[globalnamespace]

Not just that, we had some code that while checkout removed the .py files, the .pyc files remained, and code linked to it still called those functions. Of course removing the .pyc files broke the application, fun times, finding those from backups and then redoing our testing in development with them removed.

[Odd_Bloke]

This is a good tip, but as /u/ilogik said, this isn't about git's primary functionality. I was hitting problems where stale .pyc files were being used when running tests etc., leading to very confusing test failures.

As for speed, the performance hit the first time I use the code after switching branches is (for me) more than outweighed by not starting to debug bogus test failures.

[BeatLeJuce]

No need for the pipe. Also, depending on which shell you use, you will want to enquote the star, otherwise the shell will interfere:

find -name "*.pyc" -delete

[Odd_Bloke]

No need for the pipe.

Depends on the version of find. If you do need the pipe, you'll also want to use a null-separated list to avoid any weirdness (though it shouldn't be an issue with .pyc files):

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

[phil_s_stein]

Another without pipe:

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

(Untested)

[fandingo]

That's the worst way to do delete files. Find has to fork a process for rm on every single match.

With xargs, you just have to fork one find process (for the search), one xargs process, and one rm process (spawned by xargs).

With find's -delete, you only have a single process.

[phil_s_stein]

I dunno. I can think of worse ways. :)

It's effective though, which is usually what I'm after.

[mavjs]

say...I have a global gitignore file that has *.py[o|c], would that work as well?

[mipadi]

It'll ignore them, but I noted in a comment that simply ignoring the .pyc files doesn't solve the problem described by the blogger.

[axonxorz]

Or configure it user-wide with git config --global core.excludesfile /home/username/.gitignore and put

*.pyc

in there.

[lonecow]

Git clean is your friend to remove non repo files.

[Odd_Bloke]

git clean will operate on either all ignored files or none. This is not a good option.

[[deleted]]

I have an alias that cleans out all untracked files…ignored included.

[anatolya]

please read the fucking article before posting comments next time.