Excellent Utilities: fd – superior alternative to the venerable find

Last Updated on May 22, 2022

In Operation

What does fd offer?

We always like command-line utilities that have an easy to remember syntax. Or at least a syntax that doesn’t necessitate fumbling around the man page or project documentation for even simple operations.

And it helps to have sensible defaults. fd ticks this box. For example, by default fd uses case-insensitive searches unless the pattern contains an uppercase character. And by default it skips hidden directories and files as well as .gitignore patterns.

We can type fd followed by a pattern and it traverses the file structure looking for matches in the filename and outputting the results. Here’s an example.

fd is very fast in operation. In our tests, searches are performed significantly faster than find, although fd doesn’t (by default) traverse hidden and git-ignored folders. But even with a like-for-like comparison with find it’s still significantly quicker in all our tests particularly if you’re traversing across a large number of directories/files.

The utility does have an array of command-line switches. Things like limiting the directory traversal to a given depth, filter search by type (file, directory, symlink, executable, empty, socket, and pipe), limit results based on the size of files, filter files by their user and/or group, and much more.

By default, fd doesn’t sort results unless the search finishes very quickly. But using -j 1 or --threads=1 will give a deterministic order.

The utility offers parallel command execution (this is not enabled by default). This creates a job pool for executing commands in parallel for each discovered path as the input.

Next page: Page 3 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary

Complete list of articles in this series: