fd

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.

Features

• Convenient syntax: fd PATTERN instead of find -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.

Demo

Benchmark

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,fdis approximately seven times faster thanfind -iregex and about three times faster thanfind -iname`. By the way, both tools found the exact same 14030 files :smile:.

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!).

Colorized output

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.

Parallel command execution

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).

``` bash

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' ```

Install

With Rust's package manager cargo, you can install fd via: cargo install fd-find Note that rust version 1.19.0 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 package from the official repos: pacman -S fd-rs

On NixOS, or any Linux distro you can use Nix: nix-env -i fd

On Windows, you can download the pre-built binaries from the Release page.

Development

```bash git clone https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

Build

cd fd cargo build

Run unit tests and integration tests

cargo test

Install

cargo install ```

Command-line options

``` USAGE: fd [FLAGS/OPTIONS] [] []

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) -i, --ignore-case Case-insensitive 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 Set maximum search depth (default: none) -t, --type Filter by type: f(ile), d(irectory), (sym)l(ink) -e, --extension Filter by file extension -x, --exec Execute the given command for each search result -E, --exclude ... Exclude entries that match the given glob pattern. -c, --color When to use colors: never, auto, always -j, --threads Set number of threads to use for searching & executing

ARGS: the search pattern, a regular expression (optional) the root directory for the filesystem search (optional) ```

Tutorial

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.

Simple search

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): ``` bash

fd netfl Software/python/imdb-ratings/netflix-details.py `` If called with just a single argument like this, *fd* searches the current directory recursively for any entries that *contain* the patternnetfl`.

Regular expression search

The search pattern is treated as a regular expression. Here, we search for entries that start with x and end with rc: ``` bash

cd /etc fd '^x.*rc$' X11/xinit/xinitrc X11/xinit/xserverrc ```

Specifying the root directory

If we want so search a specific directory, it can be given as a second argument to fd: ``` bash

fd passwd /etc /etc/default/passwd /etc/pam.d/passwd /etc/passwd ```

Running fd without any arguments

fd 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): ``` bash

cd fd/tests fd testenv testenv/mod.rs tests.rs ```

Searching for a particular file extension

Often, 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: ``` bash

cd fd fd -e md CONTRIBUTING.md README.md ```

The -e option can be used in combination with a search pattern: ``` bash

fd -e rs mod src/fshelper/mod.rs src/lscolors/mod.rs tests/testenv/mod.rs ```

Hidden 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: ``` bash

fd pre-commit fd -H pre-commit .git/hooks/pre-commit.sample ```

If 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 --ignore) option: ``` bash

fd numcpu fd -I numcpu target/debug/deps/libnum_cpus-f5ce7ef99006aa05.rlib ```

To really search all files and directories, simply combine the hidden and ignore features to show everything (-HI).

Using fd with xargs or parallel

If we want to run a command on all search results, we can pipe the output to xargs: ``` bash

fd -0 -e rs | xargs -0 wc -l `` Here, the-0option tells *fd* to separate search results by the NULL character (instead of . newlines) In the same way, the-0option ofxargs` tells it to read the input in this way .