Can I safely delete the files in "/anaconda3/pkgs"？

Question

I found the same python package in two different directories on my MacBook. One is in /anaconda3/pkgs/ and the other is in /anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages. I wonder what the folder /anaconda3/pkgs does and can I delete the duplicate packages in there safely?

Answer 1

The pkgs directory is conda's package cache. I would strongly recommend not to delete packages there manually. Doing so can break environments that use one of these packages.

Instead you can use conda clean -p and let conda decide which of the packages are safe to delete.