Lesson 19: fd Command

fd is a simple, fast, and user-friendly tool meant to perform faster compared to find, but it is not meant to completely replace find but rather give you an easy-to-use alternative that performs slightly faster.

fd Features

Some of the notable features of fd:

• Easy to use syntax - fd pattern instead of find -iname pattern.
• Colorful output similar to the ls command.
• Fast performance - benchmarks are available on the developer's repository.
• Smart search - case-insensitive by default and switches to case-sensitive if the pattern contains an uppercase symbol.
• Does not look in hidden files and directories by default.
• Does not look into .gitignore by default.
• Unicode awareness.

Install fd on Linux

Let's look at how to install fd on different Linux distributions using the default package manager, as shown.

$ sudo apt install fd-find          # Debian, Ubuntu and Mint
$ sudo yum install fd-find          # RHEL/CentOS/Fedora and Rocky Linux/AlmaLinux
$ sudo emerge -a sys-apps/fd        # Gentoo Linux
$ sudo pacman -S fd                 # Arch Linux
$ sudo zypper install fd            # OpenSUSE
$ sudo apk add fd                   # Alpine Linux

fd Command Syntax

fd [OPTIONS] [PATTERN] [DIRECTORY]

fd Command Options

1. Check Available Options

Similar to the find command, fd has many use cases, but let's start by checking the available options:

# fd -h

Or:

# fd --help

USAGE:
    fd [FLAGS/OPTIONS] [<pattern>] [<path>...]

FLAGS:
    -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
    -e, --extension <ext>   Filter by file extension
    -E, --exclude <pattern> Exclude entries matching the given glob pattern

2. List All Files and Directories