Remove all .pyc files from a project

Question

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?

Thanks

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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 files containing spaces, and even a file 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.

Answer 4

$ which pycclean

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

Answer 5

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

rm **/*.pyc

(the globstar shell options must be enabled)

Answer 6

find . -name '*.pyc' -delete

Surely the simplest?

Answer 7

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

rm `find . -name *.pyc`