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:-). - Parallel command execution with a syntax similar to GNU Parallel.
Let's search my home folder for files that end in [0-9].jpg. It contains ~190.000
subdirectories and about a million files. For averaging and statistical analysis, I'm using
hyperfine. The following benchmarks are performed
with a "warm"/pre-filled disk-cache (results for a "cold" disk-cache show the same trends).
Let's start with find:
Benchmark #1: find ~ -iregex '.*[0-9]\.jpg$'
Time (mean ± σ): 7.236 s ± 0.090 s
Range (min … max): 7.133 s … 7.385 s
find is much faster if it does not need to perform a regular-expression search:
Benchmark #2: find ~ -iname '*[0-9].jpg'
Time (mean ± σ): 3.914 s ± 0.027 s
Range (min … max): 3.876 s … 3.964 s
Now let's try the same for fd. Note that fd always performs a regular expression
search. The options --hidden and --no-ignore are needed for a fair comparison,
otherwise fd does not have to traverse hidden folders and ignored paths (see below):
Benchmark #3: fd -HI '.*[0-9]\.jpg$' ~
Time (mean ± σ): 811.6 ms ± 26.9 ms
Range (min … max): 786.0 ms … 870.7 ms
For this particular example, fd is approximately nine times faster than find -iregex
and about five times faster than find -iname. By the way, both tools found the exact
same 20880 files 😄.
Finally, let's run fd without --hidden and --no-ignore (this can lead to different
search results, of course). If fd does not have to traverse the hidden and git-ignored
folders, it is almost an order of magnitude faster:
Benchmark #4: fd '[0-9]\.jpg$' ~
Time (mean ± σ): 123.7 ms ± 6.0 ms
Range (min … max): 118.8 ms … 140.0 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. See this repository for all necessary scripts.
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.
If the -x/--exec option is specified alongside a command template, a job pool will be created
for executing commands in parallel for each discovered path as the input. The syntax for generating
commands is similar to that of GNU Parallel:
{}: A placeholder token that will be replaced with the path of the search result (documents/images/party.jpg).{.}: Like{}, but without the file extension (documents/images/party).{/}: A placeholder that will be replaced by the basename of the search result (party.jpg).{//}: Uses the parent of the discovered path (documents/images).{/.}: Uses the basename, with the extension removed (party).
# Convert all jpg files to png files:
fd -e jpg -x convert {} {.}.png
# Unpack all zip files (if no placeholder is given, the path is appended):
fd -e zip -x unzip
# Convert all flac files into opus files:
fd -e flac -x ffmpeg -i {} -c:a libopus {.}.opus
# Count the number of lines in Rust files (the command template can be terminated with ';'):
fd -x wc -l \; -e rs... and other Debian-based Linux distributions.
Download the latest .deb package from the release page and install it via:
sudo dpkg -i fd_7.3.0_amd64.deb # adapt version number and architectureNote: fd will be officially available in Ubuntu Disco Dingo (19.04).
If you run Debian Buster or newer, you can install the officially maintained Debian package:
sudo apt-get install fd-find
Note that the binary is called fdfind as the binary name fd is already used by another package.
It is recommended that you add an alias fd=fdfind to your shells initialization file, in order to
use fd in the same way as in this documentation.
Starting with Fedora 28, you can install fd from the official package sources:
dnf install fd-findFor older versions, you can use this Fedora copr to install fd:
dnf copr enable keefle/fd
dnf install fdYou can install the fd package from the official repos:
pacman -S fd
You can use the fd ebuild from the official repo:
emerge -av fd
You can install the fd package from the official repo:
zypper in fd
You can install fd via xbps-install:
xbps-install -S fd
You can install fd with Homebrew:
brew install fd
… or with MacPorts:
sudo port install fd
You can download pre-built binaries from the release page.
Alternatively, you can install fd via Scoop:
scoop install fd
Or via Chocolatey:
choco install fd
You can use the Nix package manager to install fd:
nix-env -i fd
You can install the fd-find package from the official repo:
pkg install fd-find
You can install the fd-find package from the EPBSD repo:
ftp -o /etc/signify/epbsd-pkg.pub https://epbsd.org/epbsd-pkg.pub
export PKG_PATH=https://repo.epbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/$(arch -s):${PKG_PATH}
pkg_add fd
With Rust's package manager cargo, you can install fd via:
cargo install fd-find
Note that rust version 1.31.0 or later is required.
The release page includes precompiled binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows.
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|fd)ignore files
--no-ignore-vcs Do not respect .gitignore files
-s, --case-sensitive Case-sensitive search (default: smart case)
-i, --ignore-case Case-insensitive search (default: smart case)
-F, --fixed-strings Treat the pattern as a literal string
-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: file (f), directory (d), symlink (l),
executable (x), empty (e)
-e, --extension <ext>... Filter by file extension
-x, --exec <cmd> Execute a command for each search result
-X, --exec-batch <cmd> Execute a command with all search results at once
-E, --exclude <pattern>... Exclude entries that match the given glob pattern
-c, --color <when> When to use colors: never, *auto*, always
-S, --size <size>... Limit results based on the size of files.
--changed-within <date|dur> Filter by file modification time (newer than)
--changed-before <date|dur> Filter by file modification time (older than)
ARGS:
<pattern> the search pattern, a regular expression (optional)
<path>... the root directory for the filesystem search (optional)
This is the output of fd -h. To see the full set of command-line options, use fd --help which
also includes a much more detailed help text.
First, to get an overview of all available command line options, you can either run
fd -h for a concise help message (see above) or fd --help for a more detailed
version.
fd is designed to find entries in your filesystem. The most basic search you can perform is to
run fd with a single argument: the search pattern. For example, assume that you want to find an
old script of yours (the name included netflix):
> fd netfl
Software/python/imdb-ratings/netflix-details.pyIf called with just a single argument like this, fd searches the current directory recursively
for any entries that contain the pattern netfl.
The search pattern is treated as a regular expression. Here, we search for entries that start
with x and end with rc:
> cd /etc
> fd '^x.*rc$'
X11/xinit/xinitrc
X11/xinit/xserverrcIf we want to search a specific directory, it can be given as a second argument to fd:
> fd passwd /etc
/etc/default/passwd
/etc/pam.d/passwd
/etc/passwdfd can be called with no arguments. This is very useful to get a quick overview of all entries
in the current directory, recursively (similar to ls -R):
> cd fd/tests
> fd
testenv
testenv/mod.rs
tests.rsIf you want to use this functionality to list all files in a given directory, you have to use
a catch-all pattern such as . or ^:
> fd . fd/tests/
testenv
testenv/mod.rs
tests.rsOften, we are interested in all files of a particular type. This can be done with the -e (or
--extension) option. Here, we search for all Markdown files in the fd repository:
> cd fd
> fd -e md
CONTRIBUTING.md
README.mdThe -e option can be used in combination with a search pattern:
> fd -e rs mod
src/fshelper/mod.rs
src/lscolors/mod.rs
tests/testenv/mod.rsHidden and ignored files
By default, fd does not search hidden directories and does not show hidden files in the
search results. To disable this behavior, we can use the -H (or --hidden) option:
> fd pre-commit
> fd -H pre-commit
.git/hooks/pre-commit.sampleIf we work in a directory that is a Git repository (or includes Git repositories), fd does not
search folders (and does not show files) that match one of the .gitignore patterns. To disable
this behavior, we can use the -I (or --no-ignore) option:
> fd num_cpu
> fd -I num_cpu
target/debug/deps/libnum_cpus-f5ce7ef99006aa05.rlibTo really search all files and directories, simply combine the hidden and ignore features to show
everything (-HI).
Sometimes we want to ignore search results from a specific subdirectory. For example, we might
want to search all hidden files and directories (-H) but exclude all matches from .git
directories. We can use the -E (or --exclude) option for this. It takes an arbitrary glob
pattern as an argument:
> fd -H -E .git …We can also use this to skip mounted directories:
> fd -E /mnt/external-drive ….. or to skip certain file types:
> fd -E '*.bak' …To make exclude-patterns like these permanent, you can create a .fdignore file. They work like
.gitignore files, but are specific to fd. For example:
> cat ~/.fdignore
/mnt/external-drive
*.bakNote: fd also supports .ignore files that are used by other programs such as rg or ag.
If we want to run a command on all search results, we can pipe the output to xargs:
> fd -0 -e rs | xargs -0 wc -lHere, the -0 option tells fd to separate search results by the NULL character (instead of
newlines). In the same way, the -0 option of xargs tells it to read the input in this way.
Remember that fd ignores hidden directories and files by default. It also ignores patterns
from .gitignore files. If you want to make sure to find absolutely every possible file, always
use the options -H and -I to disable these two features:
> fd -HI …A lot of special regex characters (like [], ^, $, ..) are also special characters in your
shell. If in doubt, always make sure to put single quotes around the regex pattern:
> fd '^[A-Z][0-9]+$'If your pattern starts with a dash, you have to add -- to signal the end of command line
options. Otherwise, the pattern will be interpreted as a command-line option. Alternatively,
use a character class with a single hyphen character:
> fd -- '-pattern'
> fd '[-]pattern'You can use fd to generate input for the command-line fuzzy finder fzf:
export FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND='fd --type file'
export FZF_CTRL_T_COMMAND="$FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND"Then, you can type vim <Ctrl-T> on your terminal to open fzf and search through the fd-results.
Alternatively, you might like to follow symbolic links and include hidden files (but exclude .git folders):
export FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND='fd --type file --follow --hidden --exclude .git'You can even use fd's colored output inside fzf by setting:
export FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND="fd --type file --color=always"
export FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS="--ansi"For more details, see the Tips section of the fzf README.
The emacs package find-file-in-project can use fd to find files.
After installing find-file-in-project, add the line (setq ffip-use-rust-fd t) to your
~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el file.
In emacs, run M-x find-file-in-project-by-selected to find matching files. Alternatively, run
M-x find-file-in-project to list all available files in the project.