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Honestly I have a solution, but honestly I could not give a medal for their work to the pip devs.

1. Pip has a `--no-clean` flag. On the docs, it preserves the temporary directories for further analyse. In the reality, it preserves only some of them, and the others will be still deleted. But that is a good first try - if you have luck, you can find what you want to.

2. Somewhere I have also read, pip actually has configuration files, whose pathes you can get with the command `pip config -v list`. It has a .ini syntax and there are multiple places where you can ask pip to not delete things.

3. And this is what I have done. I have *executed pip with hooking the deletion-related libc calls to a doing-nothing function.* On this way, pip could not delete anything, note it might cause problems in the compilation, but it is also a working method. The steps are:

3.1. Create a .c file with this, for example with the name `hook.c`:

```
int unlink(char* path) {
  return 0;
}

int unlinkat(int dirfd, char* pathname, int flags) {
  return 0;
}

int rmdir(char* path) {
  return 0;
}
```

Then compile it to shared lib with the command `gcc -shared -o hook.so hook.c`.

Now, if you execute any command by prefixing it with a `LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/hook.so pip ....`, then it won't be able to delete anything any more. But it will think, it could. All the file or directory related libc calls will return success - but actually without doing anything.