A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'


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fd is a program to find entries in your filesystem.
It is a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find.
While it does not aim to support all of find's powerful functionality, it provides sensible
(opinionated) defaults for a majority of use cases.
Installation • How to use • Troubleshooting
Intuitive syntax: fd PATTERN instead of find -iname '*PATTERN'.
* Regular expression (default) and glob-based patterns.
* Very fast due to parallelized directory traversal.
* Uses colors to highlight different file types (same as ls).
* Supports parallel command execution
* 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.
The command name is *50%* shorter\ than
find :-).
!Demo
First, to get an overview of all available command line options, you can either runfd -h for a concise help message 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):
bash
> fd netfl
Software/python/imdb-ratings/netflix-details.py
netfl.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
The regular expression syntax used by fd is documented here.
If we want to 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
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
If 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 ^:
bash
> fd . fd/tests/
testenv
testenv/mod.rs
tests.rs
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
To find files with exactly the provided search pattern, use the -g (or --glob) option:
bash
> fd -g libc.so /usr
/usr/lib32/libc.so
/usr/lib/libc.so
-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 --no-ignore) option:
bash
> fd num_cpu
> fd -I num_cpu
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) or use -u/--unrestricted.
--full-path or -p option,bash
> fd -p -g '/.git/config'
> fd -p '.*/lesson-\d+/[a-z]+.(jpg|png)'
Instead of just showing the search results, you often want to do something with them. fd
provides two ways to execute external commands for each of your search results:
The -x/--exec option runs an external command *for each of the search results (in parallel).
The -X/--exec-batch option launches the external command once, with *all search results as arguments.
#### Examples
Recursively find all zip archives and unpack them:
bash
fd -e zip -x unzip
file1.zip and backup/file2.zip, this would executeunzip file1.zip and unzip backup/file2.zip. The two unzip processes run in parallelFind all .h and .cpp files and auto-format them inplace with clang-format -i:
bash
fd -e h -e cpp -x clang-format -i
-i option to clang-format can be passed as a separate argument. This is why-x option last.Any positional arguments after -x belong to the command template, not to fd itself. If you
also want to pass a pattern or search path, put -x last:
bash
fd pattern path -x echo
Find all test_*.py files and open them in your favorite editor:
bash
fd -g 'test_*.py' -X vim
-X here to open a single vim instance. If there are two such files,test_basic.py and lib/test_advanced.py, this will run vim test_basic.py lib/test_advanced.py.To see details like file permissions, owners, file sizes etc., you can tell fd to show them
by running ls for each result:
bash
fd … -X ls -lhd --color=always
fd provides a shortcut. You can use the -l/--list-detailsls in this way: fd … -l.The -X option is also useful when combining fd with ripgrep (rg) in order to search within a certain class of files, like all C++ source files:
bash
fd -e cpp -e cxx -e h -e hpp -X rg 'std::cout'
Convert all .jpg files to .png files:
bash
fd -e jpg -x convert {} {.}.png
{} is a placeholder for the search result. {.} is the same, without the file extension.The terminal output of commands run from parallel threads using -x will not be interlaced or garbled,
so fd -x can be used to rudimentarily parallelize a task run over many files.
An example of this is calculating the checksum of each individual file within a directory.
fd -tf -x md5sum > file_checksums.txt
#### Placeholder syntax
The -x and -X options take a command template as a series of arguments (instead of a single string).
If you want to add additional options to fd after the command template, you can terminate it with a \;.
For example, fd -x echo \; pattern path treats pattern path as fd arguments instead of
passing them to echo. In practice, it is often clearer to write fd pattern path -x echo.
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).
- {//}: The parent of the discovered path (documents/images).
- {/.}: The basename, with the extension removed (party).
If you do not include a placeholder, fd automatically adds a {} at the end.
#### Parallel vs. serial execution
For -x/--exec, you can control the number of parallel jobs by using the -j/--threads option.
Use --threads=1 for serial execution.
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:
bash
> fd -H -E .git …
We can also use this to skip mounted directories:
bash
> fd -E /mnt/external-drive …
.. or to skip certain file types:
bash
> 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:
bash
> cat ~/.fdignore
/mnt/external-drive
*.bak
> [!NOTE]
> fd also supports .ignore files that are used by other programs such as rg or ag.
If you want fd to ignore these patterns globally, you can put them in fd's global ignore file.
This is usually located in ~/.config/fd/ignore in macOS or Linux, and %APPDATA%\fd\ignore in
Windows.
You may wish to include .git/ in your fd/ignore file so that .git directories, and their contents
are not included in output if you use the --hidden option.
You can use fd to remove all files and directories that are matched by your search pattern.
If you only want to remove files, you can use the --exec-batch/-X option to call rm. For
example, to recursively remove all .DS_Store files, run:
bash
> fd -H '^\.DS_Store$' -tf -X rm
fd without -X rm first. Alternatively, use rms "interactive" bash
> fd -H '^\.DS_Store$' -tf -X rm -i
If you also want to remove a certain class of directories, you can use the same technique. You will
have to use rms --recursive/-r flag to remove directories.
> [!NOTE]
> There are scenarios where using fd … -X rm -r can cause race conditions: if you have a
path like …/foo/bar/foo/… and want to remove all directories named foo, you can end up in a
situation where the outer foo directory is removed first, leading to (harmless) *"'foo/bar/foo':
No such file or directory"* errors in the rm call.
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.
Usage: fd [OPTIONS] [pattern [path]...]Arguments:
[pattern] the search pattern (a regular expression, unless '--glob' is used; optional)
[path]... the root directories for the filesystem search (optional)
Options:
-H, --hidden Search hidden files and directories
-I, --no-ignore Do not respect .(git|fd)ignore files
-s, --case-sensitive Case-sensitive search (default: smart case)
-i, --ignore-case Case-insensitive search (default: smart case)
-g, --glob Glob-based search (default: regular expression)
-a, --absolute-path Show absolute instead of relative paths
-l, --list-details Use a long listing format with file metadata
-L, --follow Follow symbolic links
-p, --full-path Search full abs. path (default: filename only)
-d, --max-depth Set maximum search depth (default: none)
-E, --exclude Exclude entries that match the given glob pattern
-t, --type Filter by type: file (f), directory (d/dir), symlink (l),
executable (x), empty (e), socket (s), pipe (p), char-device
(c), block-device (b)
-e, --extension Filter by file extension
-S, --size Limit results based on the size of files
--changed-within Filter by file modification time (newer than)
--changed-before Filter by file modification time (older than)
-o, --owner Filter by owning user and/or group
--format Print results according to template
-x, --exec ... Execute a command for each search result
-X, --exec-batch ... Execute a command with all search results at once
-c, --color When to use colors [default: auto] [possible values: auto,
always, never]
--hyperlink[=] Add hyperlinks to output paths [default: never] [possible
values: auto, always, never]
--ignore-contain Ignore directories containing the named entry
-h, --help Print help (see more with '--help')
-V, --version Print version
Note that options can be given after the pattern and/or path as well.
Let's search my home folder for files that end in [0-9].jpg. It contains ~750.000
subdirectories and about a 4 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): 19.922 s ± 0.109 s
Range (min … max): 19.765 s … 20.065 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): 11.226 s ± 0.104 s
Range (min … max): 11.119 s … 11.466 s
Now let's try the same for fd. Note that fd performs a regular expression
search by default. The options -u/--unrestricted option is needed here for
a fair comparison. Otherwise fd does not have to traverse hidden folders and
ignored paths (see below):
Benchmark 3: fd -u '[0-9]\.jpg$' ~
Time (mean ± σ): 854.8 ms ± 10.0 ms
Range (min … max): 839.2 ms … 868.9 ms
fd is approximately 23 times faster than find -iregexfind -iname. By the way, both tools found the exactNote: This is one particular* benchmark on *one particular machine. While we have
performed a lot of different tests (and found consistent results), things might
be different for you! We encourage everyone to try it out on their own. See
this repository for all necessary scripts.
Concerning fd's speed, a lot of credit goes to the regex and ignore crates that are
also used in ripgrep (check it out!).
fd does not find my file!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 -u/--unrestricted option (or -HI to enable hidden and ignored files):
bash
> fd -u …
Also remember that by default, fd only searches based on the filename and
doesn't compare the pattern to the full path. If you want to search based on the
full path (similar to the -path option of find) you need to use the --full-path
(or -p) option.
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 on Windows or if you are looking
for alternative, more complete (or more colorful) variants, see here,
here or
here.
fd also honors the NO_COLOR environment variable.
fd doesn't seem to interpret my regex pattern correctlyA lot of special regex characters (like [], ^, $, ..) are also special characters in your
shell. If in doubt, always make sure to put single quotes around the regex pattern:
bash
> fd '^[A-Z][0-9]+$'
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:
bash
> fd -- '-pattern'
> fd '[-]pattern'
aliases or shell functionsShell aliases and shell functions can not be used for command execution via fd -x orfd -X. In zsh, you can make the alias global via alias -g myalias="…". In bash,
you can use export -f my_function to make available to child processes. You would still
need to call fd -x bash -c 'my_function "$1"' bash. For other use cases or shells, use
a (temporary) shell script.
-x/-XDepending on your shell, you may need to quote the placeholders ({}, {/}, {//},{.}, {/.}) to prevent the shell from interpreting them before fd sees them.
fzfYou can use fd to generate input for the command-line fuzzy finder fzf:
bash
export FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND='fd --type file'
export FZF_CTRL_T_COMMAND="$FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND"
Then, you can type vim 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):
bash
export FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND='fd --type file --follow --hidden --exclude .git'
You can even use fd's colored output inside fzf by setting:
bash
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.
rofirofi* is a graphical launch menu application that is able to create menus by reading from *stdin. Piping fd output into rofis -dmenu mode creates fuzzy-searchable lists of files and directories.
#### Example
Create a case-insensitive searchable multi-select list of PDF files under your $HOME directory and open the selection with your configured PDF viewer. To list all file types, drop the -e pdf argument.
bash
fd --type f -e pdf . $HOME | rofi -keep-right -dmenu -i -p FILES -multi-select | xargs -I {} xdg-open {}
To modify the list that is presented by rofi, add arguments to the fd command. To modify the search behaviour of rofi, add arguments to the rofi command.
emacsThe 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, runM-x find-file-in-project to list all available files in the project.
To format the output of fd as a file-tree you can use the tree command with--fromfile:
bash
❯ fd | tree --fromfile
This can be more useful than running tree by itself because tree does not
ignore any files by default, nor does it support as rich a set of options asfd does to control what to print:
bash
❯ fd --extension rs | tree --fromfile
.
├── build.rs
└── src
├── app.rs
└── error.rs
On bash and similar you can simply create an alias:
bash
❯ alias as-tree='tree --fromfile'
xargs or parallelNote that fd has a builtin feature for command execution with
its -x/--exec and -X/--exec-batch options. If you prefer, you can still use
it in combination with xargs:
bash
> fd -0 -e rs | xargs -0 wc -l
-0 option tells fd to separate search results by the NULL character (instead of-0 option of xargs tells it to read the input in this way.
If you run Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo) or newer, you can install the
officially maintained package:
apt install fd-find
fdfind as the binary name fd is already used by another package.fd by executing commandln -s $(which fdfind) ~/.local/bin/fd, in order to use fd in the same way as in this documentation.$HOME/.local/bin is in your $PATH.If you use an older version of Ubuntu, you can download the latest .deb package from the
release page and install it via:
bash
dpkg -i fd_9.0.0_amd64.deb # adapt version number and architecture
Note that the .deb packages on the release page for this project still name the executable fd.
If you run Debian Buster or newer, you can install the
officially maintained Debian package:
apt-get install fd-find
fdfind as the binary name fd is already used by another package.fd by executing commandln -s $(which fdfind) ~/.local/bin/fd, in order to use fd in the same way as in this documentation.$HOME/.local/bin is in your $PATH.Note that the .deb packages on the release page for this project still name the executable fd.
Starting with Fedora 28, you can install fd from the official package sources:
bash
dnf install fd-find
You can install the fd package
from the official sources, provided you have the appropriate repository enabled:
apk add fd
You 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 the fd package from the official repo:
apt-get install fd
You can install the fd package from the official repo:
eopkg install fd
You can install the fd package from Fedora Copr.
bash
dnf copr enable tkbcopr/fd
dnf install fd
A different version using the slower malloc instead of jemalloc is also available from the EPEL8/9 repo as the package fd-find.
You can install fd with Homebrew:
brew install fd
… or with MacPorts:
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
Or via Winget:
winget install sharkdp.fd
You can install the fd package from the official repo:
guix install fd
You can use mise to install fd with a command like this:
mise use -g fd@latest
You can use the Nix package manager to install fd:
nix-env -i fd
You can use Flox to install fd into a Flox environment:
flox install fd
You can install the fd-find package from the official repo:
pkg install fd-find
On Linux and macOS, you can install the fd-find package:
npm install -g fd-find
With Rust's package manager cargo, you can install fd via:
cargo install fd-find
make is also needed for the build.
The release page includes precompiled binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows. Statically-linked binaries are also available: look for archives with musl in the file name.
bash
git clone https://github.com/sharkdp/fdBuild
cd fd
cargo buildRun unit tests and integration tests
cargo testInstall
cargo install --path .
#### From Release Archives
Pre-built completion files are included in the release archives (.tar.gz/.zip) on the
Releases page, in the autocomplete directory.
To use these completions:
- bash: Source the fd.bash file in your ~/.bashrc, or place it in a directory that gets sourced automatically.
- zsh: Move _fd to a directory in your fpath (e.g., ~/.zfunc).
- fish: Copy fd.fish to ~/.config/fish/completions/.
- powershell: Source _fd.ps1 from one of your profile scripts.
#### Generate from fd
You can also generate completions directly using fd --gen-completions :
bash
Bash
fd --gen-completions bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/fdZsh (ensure ~/.zfunc is in your fpath)
fd --gen-completions zsh > ~/.zfunc/_fdFish
fd --gen-completions fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/fd.fishPowerShell
fd --gen-completions powershell >> $PROFILE
- sharkdp
- tmccombs
- tavianator
fd is distributed under the terms of both the MIT License and the Apache License 2.0.
See the LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT files for license details.