The Creo Parametric software (f.k.a. Pro/Engineer) saves its files as numbered versions. While this is in itself commendable (it's nice to be able to roll-back to a previously known good version of a file) it is an old-fashioned approach in the age of modern revision control software such as e.g. git. If you save often when working in Creo (which is generally a good idea) you end up with lots of versions of the same file.

So I wrote a script to help clean up this mess. For obvious reasons it is called creoclean.

This program is licensed under the BSD 2-clause license. See the top of creoclean.py for the full text.

You can use this program basically in two ways:

creoclean

This cleans up the current working directory. Or you can use:

creoclean <dir1> <dir2> ...

This cleans up the directories named on the command line.

The -h option displays the online help.:

> creoclean -h
usage: creoclean [-h] [-d] [-v] [--log {debug,info,warning,error}]
                [dir [dir ...]]

Cleans up Creo versioned files in the named diratories or in the current
working directory. Removes all versions except the last one, and renames that
to version 1.

positional arguments:
dir                   one or more directories to process

optional arguments:
-h, --help            show this help message and exit
-d                    dry run; show what would be done but don't delete
                        files
-v, --version         show program's version number and exit
--log {debug,info,warning,error}
                        logging level (defaults to 'warning')

The -d option makes the program perform a dry run. This means that all actions are listed but not carried out.:

> creoclean -d ~/tmp/spam-eggs/
INFO: DRY RUN, no files will be deleted or renamed
INFO: cleaning in '/home/jdoe/tmp/spam-eggs/'
INFO: found 21 files
INFO: not enough 'asm' files; skipping
INFO: found 9 'prt' files
INFO: found 2 unique 'prt' file names
INFO: removing 'spamshaper.prt.10'
INFO: removing 'spamshaper.prt.11'
INFO: removing 'spamshaper.prt.12'
INFO: renaming 'spamshaper.prt.13' to 'spamshaper.prt.1'
INFO: removing 'eggcontainer.prt.5'
INFO: removing 'eggcontainer.prt.6'
INFO: removing 'eggcontainer.prt.7'
INFO: removing 'eggcontainer.prt.8'
INFO: renaming 'eggcontainer.prt.9' to 'eggcontainer.prt.1'

You can see the same information during a real run by specifying the --log info option.

This script requires Python 3. It has been developed and tested on Python 3.4. It has no further dependencies outside of the Python standard library.

Copy the file creoclean.py to the Scripts subdirectory of your Python installation. You can then call it from a cmd.exe window, if the .py extension is associated with a filetype, and the filetype has an appropriate action defined. If trying to run creoclean.py gives an error, try executing the following commands in a cmd.exe window:

assoc .py=Python.File
ftype Python.File="C:\Anaconda3\python.exe" "%1" %*

Note that C:\Anaconda3 is just an example! You should of course substitute the real path to your python.exe.

Copy creoclean.py to any directory in your PATH, and set the permissions to executable, e.g. using the install program:

install creoclean.py ~/bin/creoclean