One conda env, multiple paths

Question

I can't figure out why my base environment is stored in 8 different places. I just ran conda update --all and conda clean -all to try and make conda run faster, but I can't find any resources on why the base env would have so many duplicates. A related question: does this matter?

(base) PS C:\Windows\system32> conda env list
# conda environments:
#
base                  *  C:\Anaconda3
                         C:\Anaconda3\conda-bld\weighted-levenshtein_1632528057644\_h_env
                         C:\Anaconda3\conda-bld\weighted-levenshtein_1632528103929\_h_env
                         C:\Anaconda3\conda-bld\weighted-levenshtein_1632528645279\_h_env
                         C:\Anaconda3\conda-bld\weighted-levenshtein_1632529570286\_h_env
                         C:\Anaconda3\conda-bld\weighted_levenshtein_1632526748438\_h_env
                         C:\Anaconda3\conda-bld\weighted_levenshtein_1632526811563\_h_env
                         C:\Anaconda3\conda-bld\weighted_levenshtein_1632528679805\_h_env
tf                       C:\Anaconda3\envs\tf

Answer 1

I don't think those are all copies of your base env, they look like they are intermediates from conda build commands and can be removed with conda build purge.

The format is a bit misleading, but the same format appears when you create a conda environment without a name, but with a target prefix, which you can verify by doing

conda create -p testEnv
conda info --envs