Thank you for the comments. I was annoyed by py_compile making files with names very similar to the original scripts, names that could not even be recognized by shell patterns in .gitignore unless scripts ending with "c" are banned. But that problem is addressed in Python 3. I don't really care what files are in __pycache__, I won't have that urge to remove them. And then I simply was annoyed by the fact that py_compile was ignoring my attempts to suppress its output. Now I understand the reason for that. Migrating to Python 3 would address my original problem with strange looking cache files. I'm going to close this issue.