clean

The quick little project cleaner.

clean is a tiny little utility to recursively delete compiled output, editor cruft, etc. from your projects. It runs in a split second as it will completely skip over programming language environments such as Python virtual envs, node_modules, and any hidden dot directories.

Installation

1. Download a copy for your platform.

2. Rename the downloaded file to clean or clean.exe.

3. Put it somewhere on your PATH.

   • Linux/mac: I recommend /usr/local/bin/. Then mark as executable with chmod +x clean

   • Windows: I recommend creating a tools folder in your home folder (e.g. C:\Users\YourName\tools\) and then updating your PATH to include that folder. Then you can put all your own scripts and tools here.

4. Open a shell, cd to a project, and type clean.

Run clean -help to see full options and usage instructions.

What does it clean?

• Compiled output (C, C++, Go, etc.) - removes:

  • .app
  • .dll
  • .dylib
  • .exe
  • .idb
  • .ko
  • .o
  • .obj
  • .out
  • .pdb
  • .so
  • .test

• Python - removes:

  • __pycache__ directories and their contents.
  • .pyc files.

• Editors - removes Emacs/Vim backups and autosaves.

• Custom - specify a string to remove all files ending in that extension.

Why not use find?

find is the venerable old standard, but the down side is that it still has to descend into all directories to do regex comparisons against every path to decide whether or not to include/exclude. On a large project with huge node_modules, local Python virtual env, etc. this still takes a lot of time to run (especially on NTFS, or worse on a spinning disk!)

Configuring find to delete/ignore everything you want also requires an unweidly amount of options, arguments, and regular expressions which makes it difficult to share with other team members (everyone having to pass around their shell aliases and scripts).

Inspiration

This is inspired by the pyclean command that ships with Debian, which is used to delete .pyc files before uploading/shipping python code.

Contributing

Want to add support for your languages/projects? Please submit a pull request!

Future features may include ability to specify what to delete or what to ignore using a config file, which would be useful for customizing within large projects.