fd is a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find.
While it does not seek to mirror all of find's powerful functionality, it provides sensible (opinionated) defaults for 80% of the use cases.
- Convenient syntax:
fd PATTERNinstead offind -iname '*PATTERN*'. - Colorized terminal output (similar to ls).
- It's fast (see benchmarks below).
- Smart case: the search is case-insensitive by default. It switches to case-sensitive if the pattern contains an uppercase character*.
- Ignores hidden directories and files, by default.
- Ignores patterns from your
.gitignore, by default. - Regular expressions.
- Unicode-awareness.
- The command name is 50% shorter* than
find:-).
Let's search my home folder for files that end in [0-9].jpg. It contains ~150.000
subdirectories and about a million files. For averaging and statistical analysis, I'm using
bench. All benchmarks are performed for a "warm
cache". Results for a cold cache are similar.
Let's start with find:
find ~ -iregex '.*[0-9]\.jpg$'
time 6.265 s (6.127 s .. NaN s)
1.000 R² (1.000 R² .. 1.000 R²)
mean 6.162 s (6.140 s .. 6.181 s)
std dev 31.73 ms (0.0 s .. 33.48 ms)
find is much faster if it does not need to perform a regular-expression search:
find ~ -iname '*[0-9].jpg'
time 2.866 s (2.754 s .. 2.964 s)
1.000 R² (0.999 R² .. 1.000 R²)
mean 2.860 s (2.834 s .. 2.875 s)
std dev 23.11 ms (0.0 s .. 25.09 ms)
Now let's try the same for fd. Note that fd always performs a regular expression
search. The options --hidden and --no-ignore are needed for a fair comparison,
otherwise fd does not have to traverse hidden folders and ignored paths (see below):
fd --hidden --no-ignore '.*[0-9]\.jpg$' ~
time 892.6 ms (839.0 ms .. 915.4 ms)
0.999 R² (0.997 R² .. 1.000 R²)
mean 871.2 ms (857.9 ms .. 881.3 ms)
std dev 15.50 ms (0.0 s .. 17.49 ms)
For this particular example, fd is approximately seven times faster than find -iregex
and about three times faster than find -iname. By the way, both tools found the exact
same 14030 files 😄.
Finally, let's run fd without --hidden and --no-ignore (this can lead to different
search results, of course):
fd '[0-9]\.jpg$' ~
time 159.5 ms (155.8 ms .. 165.3 ms)
0.999 R² (0.996 R² .. 1.000 R²)
mean 158.7 ms (156.5 ms .. 161.6 ms)
std dev 3.263 ms (2.401 ms .. 4.298 ms)
Note: This is one particular benchmark on one particular machine. While I have performed quite a lot of different tests (and found consistent results), things might be different for you! I encourage everyone to try it out on their own.
Concerning fd's speed, the main credit goes to the regex and ignore crates that are also used
in ripgrep (check it out!).
fd can colorize files by extension, just like ls. In order for this to work, the environment
variable LS_COLORS has to be set. Typically, the value
of this variable is set by the dircolors command which provides a convenient configuration format
to define colors for different file formats.
On most distributions, LS_COLORS should be set already. If you are looking for alternative, more
complete (and more colorful) variants, see
here or
here.
With Rust's package manager cargo, you can install fd via:
cargo install fd-find
Note that rust version 1.16.0 or later is required. The release page of this repository also includes precompiled binaries for Linux.
On macOS, you can use Homebrew:
brew install fd
On Arch Linux, you can install the AUR package fd-rs via yaourt, or manually:
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/fd-rs.git
cd fd-rs
makepkg -si
On Windows, you can download the pre-built binaries from the Release page.
git clone https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
# Build
cd fd
cargo build
# Run unit tests and integration tests
cargo test
# Install
cargo installUSAGE:
fd [FLAGS/OPTIONS] [<pattern>] [<path>]
FLAGS:
-H, --hidden Search hidden files and directories
-I, --no-ignore Do not respect .(git)ignore files
-s, --case-sensitive Case-sensitive search (default: smart case)
-a, --absolute-path Show absolute instead of relative paths
-L, --follow Follow symbolic links
-p, --full-path Search full path (default: file-/dirname only)
-0, --print0 Separate results by the null character
-h, --help Prints help information
-V, --version Prints version information
OPTIONS:
-d, --max-depth <depth> Set maximum search depth (default: none)
-t, --type <filetype> Filter by type: f(ile), d(irectory), (sym)l(ink)
-e, --extension <ext> Filter by file extension
-c, --color <when> When to use color in the output:
never, auto, always (default: auto)
-j, --threads <num> Set number of threads to use for searching:
(default: number of available CPU cores)
ARGS:
<pattern> the search pattern, a regular expression (optional)
<path> the root directory for the filesystem search (optional)
First, to see all command line options, you can get fd's help text by running:
fd --help
For the sake of this tutorial, let's assume we have a directory with the following file structure:
fd_examples
├── .gitignore
├── desub_dir
│ └── old_test.txt
├── not_file
├── sub_dir
│ ├── .here_be_tests
│ ├── more_dir
│ │ ├── .not_here
│ │ ├── even_further_down
│ │ │ ├── not_me.sh
│ │ │ ├── test_seven
│ │ │ └── testing_eight
│ │ ├── not_file -> /Users/fd_user/Desktop/fd_examples/not_file
│ │ └── test_file_six
│ ├── new_test.txt
│ ├── test_file_five
│ ├── test_file_four
│ └── test_file_three
├── test_file_one
├── test_file_two
├── test_one
└── this_is_a_test
If fd is called with a single argument (the search pattern), it will perform a recursive search
through the current directory. To search for all files that include the string "test", we can
simply run:
> fd test
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/test_seven
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/testing_eight
sub_dir/more_dir/test_file_six
sub_dir/test_file_five
sub_dir/test_file_three
sub_dir/test_four
test_file_one
test_file_two
test_one
this_is_a_test
The search pattern is treated as a regular expression. To show only entries that start with "test", we can call:
> fd '^test'
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/test_seven
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/testing_eight
sub_dir/more_dir/test_file_six
sub_dir/test_file_five
sub_dir/test_file_three
sub_dir/test_four
test_file_one
test_file_two
test_one
Note that fd does not show hidden files (.here_be_tests) by default. To change this, we can use
the -H (or --hidden) option:
> fd -H test
sub_dir/.here_be_tests
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/test_seven
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/testing_eight
sub_dir/more_dir/test_file_six
sub_dir/test_file_five
sub_dir/test_file_four
sub_dir/test_file_three
test_file_one
test_file_two
test_one
this_is_a_test
If we are interested in showing the results from a particular directory, we can specify the root of the search as a second argument:
> fd test sub_dir
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/test_seven
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/testing_eight
sub_dir/more_dir/test_file_six
sub_dir/test_file_five
sub_dir/test_file_three
sub_dir/test_four
If we don't give any arguments to fd, it simply shows all entries in the current directory,
recursively (like ls -R):
> fd
not_file
sub_dir
sub_dir/more_dir
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/test_seven
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/testing_eight
sub_dir/more_dir/not_file
sub_dir/more_dir/test_file_six
sub_dir/test_file_five
sub_dir/test_file_three
sub_dir/test_four
test_file_one
test_file_two
test_one
this_is_a_test
If we work in a directory that is a Git repository (or includes several Git repositories), fd
does not search folders (and does not show files) that match the .gitignore pattern. For example,
imagine we had a .gitignore file with the following content:
*.sh
In this case, fd would not show any files that end in .sh. To disable this behavior, we can
use the -I (or --ignore) option:
> fd -I me
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/not_me.sh
To really search all files and directories, we can combine the hidden and ignore features to show
everything (-HI):
fd -HI 'not|here'
not_file
sub_dir/.here_be_tests
sub_dir/more_dir/.not_here
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/not_me.sh
sub_dir/more_dir/not_file
Searching for a file extension is easy too, using the -e (or --extension) switch for file
extensions:
> fd -e sh
sub_dir/more_dir/even_further_down/not_me.sh
Next, we can even use a pattern in combination with -e to search for a regex pattern over the
files that end in the specified extension.
> fd -e txt test
fd_examples/desub_dir/old_test.txt
fd_examples/sub_dir/new_test.txt
If we want to run a command for each of the search results, we can use the -0 option to pipe
the output to xargs:
> fd -0 'test' | xargs -0 wc -l