A simple program which checks Python source files for errors.

Pyflakes analyzes programs and detects various errors. It works by parsing the source file, not importing it, so it is safe to use on modules with side effects. It's also much faster.

It is available on PyPI and it supports all active versions of Python from 2.5 to 3.5.

It can be installed with:

$ pip install --upgrade pyflakes

Useful tips:

• Be sure to install it for a version of Python which is compatible with your codebase: for Python 2, pip2 install pyflakes and for Python3, pip3 install pyflakes.
• You can also invoke Pyflakes with python3 -m pyflakes . or python2 -m pyflakes . if you have it installed for both versions.
• If you require more options and more flexibility, you could give a look to Flake8 too.

Pyflakes makes a simple promise: it will never complain about style, and it will try very, very hard to never emit false positives.

Pyflakes is also faster than Pylint or Pychecker. This is largely because Pyflakes only examines the syntax tree of each file individually. As a consequence, Pyflakes is more limited in the types of things it can check.

If you like Pyflakes but also want stylistic checks, you want flake8, which combines Pyflakes with style checks against PEP 8 and adds per-project configuration ability.

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