You may want to disable caching for certain specific files in your configuration. For example, if you only want to put executable files in a central cache, but not the intermediate object files, you can use the NoCache function to specify that the object files should not be cached:

env = Environment()
obj = env.Object('hello.c')
env.Program('hello.c')
CacheDir('cache')
NoCache('hello.o')
       

Then when you run scons after cleaning the built targets, it will recompile the object file locally (since it doesn't exist in the derived-file cache directory), but still realize that the derived-file cache directory contains an up-to-date executable program that can be retrieved instead of re-linking:

% scons -Q
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
cc -o hello hello.o
% scons -Q -c
Removed hello.o
Removed hello
% scons -Q
cc -o hello.o -c hello.c
Retrieved `hello' from cache