fd - Efficient file finding

Nov 6, 2022 · 2 min read · file management search cli  ·
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fd is a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find, written in Rust.

fd is a program to find files and directories in the filesystem. It is a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to the find program included in the GNU Find Utilities (Findutils), commonly included by default in any Linux distribution.

As stated by the author, fd does not aim at supporting all the functionalities of find, but it provides sensible (opinionated) defaults for a large set of typical use cases.

Probably the most important feature, if conpared to find, is a more intuitive syntax: the most basic search of files containing a pattern can be done with a simple fd PATTERN instead of the more convoluted command find -iname '*PATTERN*'.

The execution is very fast thanks to the parallelized directory traversal, and to the fact that - by default - hidden files and directories are not searched. This is valid also for directories included in .gitignore files of git repositories.

fd improves the readability of the output w.r.t. to find by using colors to highlight different file types.

Thanks to the smart case, fd performs a case-insensitive search by default, but switches to case-sensitive if the pattern contains an uppercase character.

As a final funny feature, the author outline that the command name is 50% shorter than find. However, when installed as Ubuntu package, the executable is called fdfind to avoid a conflict with an existing package, which makes the command name 50% longer than find. :-)

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