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*'.
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.
Colorized terminal output (similar to ls).
Regular expressions by default.
Unicode-aware.
The command name is 50% shorter* than find :-).

Demo

Colorized output

fd can colorize files by extension, just like ls. In order for this to work, you need to set up a ~/.dir_colors file. The easiest way is to call

dircolors --print-database > ~/.dir_colors

More complete (and more colorful) alternatives can be found here or here.

Benchmark

A search in my home folder with ~80.000 subdirectories and ~350.000 files. The --hidden for fd is needed for a fair comparison, as find does this by default:

> time fd --hidden '\.jpg$' > /dev/null
0,39s user 0,40s system 99% cpu 0,790 total

> time find -iname '*.jpg' > /dev/null 
0,36s user 0,42s system 98% cpu 0,789 total

Both tools found the exact same 5504 files and have a comparable performance (averaged over multiple runs), even though fd performs a regex search. If we do the same for find, it is significantly slower:

> time find -iregex '.*\.jpg$' > /dev/null
1,29s user 0,41s system 99% cpu 1,705 total

Install

With cargo, you can clone, build and install fd with a single command:

cargo install --git https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

The release page of this repository also includes precompiled binaries for Linux.

Development

cargo build --release

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fd