Changing the directory where .pyc files are created
This might be useful for some:Miscellaneous options, especially -B
option:
If given, Python won’t try to write .pyc files on the import of source modules. See also
PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE
.
Yes, starting from Python 3.8 you can control this behavior. The original discussion starts from pep 304 in 2003.
While this original PEP was withdrawn, a variant of this feature was eventually implemented for Python 3.8 in https://bugs.python.org/issue33499
In the result, you can control using PYTHONPYCACHEPREFIX=path
, -X pycache_prefix=path
and sys.pycache_prefix
.
There's no way to change where the .pyc files go. Python 3.2 implements the __pycache__
scheme whereby all the .pyc files go into a directory named __pycache__
. Python 3.2 alpha 1 is available now if you really need to keep your directories clean.
Until 3.2 is released, configure as many tools as you can to ignore the .pyc files.