Module 1: File & Directory Management

Lesson 19: fd Command

In this lesson, you'll learn how to use the fd command as a simple, fast, and user-friendly alternative to the find command in Linux.

fd Command: A fast and user-friendly alternative to find for searching files and directories.

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

Option	Description
`-e EXT`	Filter results by file extension
`-E PATTERN`	Exclude files or directories matching a pattern
`-x` or `--exec`	Execute a command for each search result in parallel
`-H`	Include hidden files and directories in results
`-i`	Case-insensitive search
`-s`	Case-sensitive search
`-t TYPE`	Filter by type: `f` (file), `d` (directory), `l` (symlink)
`-h` or `--help`	Display help information

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