As an important speed-up of the start-up time for short programs that use a lot of standard modules, if a file called spam.pyc exists in the directory where spam.py is found, this is assumed to contain an already-``compiled'' version of the module spam. The modification time of the version of spam.py used to create spam.pyc is recorded in spam.pyc, and the file is ignored if these don't match.
Whenever spam.py is successfully compiled, an attempt is made to write the compiled version to spam.pyc. It is not an error if this attempt fails; if for any reason the file is not written completely, the resulting spam.pyc file will be recognized as invalid and thus ignored later.