One-Liner to Clean Python Bytecode

by Audrey M. Roy Greenfeld | Thu, Feb 20, 2025

How to remove stale .pyc files and __pycache__ directories, using uvx + pyclean.

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Overview

I like to use the PyClean tool by Peter Bittner like this:

uvx pyclean .

This one-liner:

1. Creates an ephemeral virtualenv with uvx
2. Installs pyclean from PyPI into it
3. Runs it to remove all Python bytecode files from the current dir, recursively
4. Auto-deletes the venv, including pyclean

Example

Here I run it on several of my git repos:

(uv) fun % uvx pyclean .
Cleaning directory .
Total 93 files, 34 directories removed.

uvx and the uv Tool Interface

uvx is an alias for uv tool run, part of the uv Python package manager.

It creates a single-use disposable virtualenv for whatever tool you install and run with it. Here the tool name matches the PyPI package name, but it does also support uvx <package-name>:<command-name>.