mess deletes common temporary development files in your projects. It ships with common cleanup patterns for popular programming languages like caches, build artifacts, bytecode files, linters output, etc.

Why a separate tool instead of a bash script?

• Reports reclaimed disk space
• Easy to configure and override patterns
• Simple and fast
• Reduces the number of bash scripts in the world

Download a ready-to-use pre-built binary for your platform (Linux and macOS are currently supported) in GitHub releases.

go install github.com/olzhasar/mess@latest

make install

By default, this installs mess to ~/.local/bin. To install elsewhere, set PREFIX:

make install PREFIX=/usr/local

CAUTION: this tool deletes files and directories from your filesystem!

While the pre-configured patterns should be safe for most users, please, read the patterns list first and ensure it fits your needs. See Patterns

Clean a specific path (scans only direct children by default):

mess clean ~/my_projects

Scan subdirectories too:

mess clean -r ~/my_projects

Print each removed path:

mess clean -v ~/my_projects

Use custom patterns for one run. These replace the configured patterns:

mess clean -r -p "node_modules,*.pyc" ~/dev/lots-of-js/

To display the currently configured patterns, run:

mess patterns

By default, mess uses its built-in PATTERNS. To override them you can use either use a -p flag or you can create one of these files:

• ~/.mess_patterns
• <user-config-dir>/mess/patterns

The user config directory is provided by your operating system. On Linux it's $XDG_CONFIG_HOME (defaults to ~/.config), on Darwin - ~/Library/Application Support/

Pattern files use one pattern per line. Empty lines and lines starting with # are ignored.

Patterns use a shell glob-style syntax.

Example:

# Python
*.pyc
__pycache__

# JavaScript
node_modules

# Specific path
foo/bar/

MIT