vulture(1)

💖 vulture(1) — the manual page, bestie edition 💖

okay so you opened the manual for vulture (that's section 1, the user commands section, iykyk) and honestly? you came to the right place. sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, and let's get into it.

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✨ NAME ✨

vulture — searches for unused ("dead") code in a Python program 🪦💀

like... it goes looking for the code nobody's using. the leftovers. the ghost functions. the main character who never gets called. iconic behaviour fr fr.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

vulture [options] <path>

that's it. that's the whole shape of it. you give it options, you give it a path, and it does its thing. 💅

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

Vulture scans for unused classes, functions and variables. yes, classes, functions AND variables. it's thorough like that. 👑

b u t — and this is the part where we get real — because of Python's dynamic nature, it's impossible to find all unused code with a static code analyzer. that's just the vibe of dynamic languages, bestie. no cap.

here's why, lowkey: the analyzer ignores scopes and scans only token names. so it's not out here doing deep detective work on your variable bindings — it's reading names off the page. 📖✨

and additionally — yes, there's an additional — some dynamic items that are not explicitly called in the code may be incorrectly reported. so sometimes it'll point at something and be like "dead code!!" and you'll be like "girl that's a decorator-registered thing" and it'll be like 🧍. it's doing its best. it's a heuristic. it's giving helpful-coworker-energy, not omniscient-god-energy. 🙈

tl;dr — trust it, but verify it. false positives are a known vibe here, not a bug you found. 💜

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -h, --help — the help flag 🎀. you know her, you love her.
• --exclude=<exclude> — a comma-separated list of filename patterns to exclude, e.g. svn,external. commas, not spaces. commas, bestie, I'm begging 😭. stuff matching these patterns just doesn't get scanned.
• -v, --verbose — the verbose flag ✨. more talking. more output. she has ✨thoughts✨ and she's sharing them.

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✨ AUTHORS ✨

vulture was written by Jendrik Seipp <jendrikseipp@web.de> 🫶 — go say thank you, send them a nice email, that's the respectful move. 💌

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and that's the page!! thanks for coming to my ted talk 🌸

vulture — version 2.16, dated 19 April 2026 — part of the vulture(1) manual, mwah 💋 go find some dead code and set it free 🦋✨