Boost Your Linux File Searches with fd: Faster, Colorful, and Easy-to-Use

What is fd?

fd is a modern, faster alternative to the Unix find command. It provides a simpler syntax, sensible defaults, colored output, and automatically respects .gitignore files. Benchmarks on the project's GitHub repository show typical speed improvements of 8–9× over find.

Installation

Ubuntu 19.04 and newer: sudo apt-get install fd-find The binary is named fdfind to avoid a name clash. Create a convenient alias: alias fd=fdfind Persist the alias by adding it to ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_aliases. Equivalent packages for other distributions:

Fedora: sudo dnf install fd-find Manjaro:

sudo pacman -Syu fd

Basic Usage

Running fd without options lists files recursively, similar to ls but descending into sub‑directories. fd Search by file extension (case‑insensitive, omit the leading dot): fd -e png Search for a specific file name: fd linuxmi.png Search within a particular directory:

fd passwd /etc

Type Filtering and Case Sensitivity

Use -t to restrict results to a specific type: f – regular files d – directories l – symbolic links x – executable files e – empty files

Example – find directories named images: fd -td images Searches are case‑insensitive by default. Including an uppercase character forces case‑sensitive matching:

fd -tf linux   # matches “linux” and “Linux"
fd -tf Linux   # matches only “Linux"

Executing Commands on Matches

The -x (or --exec) option runs a command for each matched file. Placeholders can be used to refer to parts of the path: {} – full path {.} – path without extension {/} – basename {//} – parent directory {/.} – basename without extension

Example – unzip every .zip file into its own parent directory:

fd -e zip -x unzip {} -d {//}

Summary

fd offers a concise, high‑performance interface for file searching on Linux. It does not aim to replace find in all scenarios, but for everyday use it provides faster results, built‑in .gitignore awareness, colored output, and flexible command execution.