fd: The Fast, Friendly Alternative to find

One search tool to rule your filesystem.

Every Linux user meets find eventually — and most of us find it awkward. Its flags are cryptic (-iname, -type f, -print0), the syntax trips up even experienced users, and the defaults are noisy.

Enter fd, a Rust rewrite by sharkdp that promises to be a "simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find." It's one of the most popular new command-line tools on GitHub, with more than 40,000 stars and an active maintainer community. If you've ever fumbled through a file search, fd is worth a look.

What makes fd different

The core idea is sensible defaults on purpose. Where find makes you spell everything out, fd guesses what you probably meant:

Simple syntax. fd PATTERN replaces the clunky find -iname '*PATTERN*'. No wildcards required — fd treats your pattern as a regex by default and matches across the tree.
Smart case. Searches are case-insensitive by default, but fd flips to case-sensitive the moment your pattern contains an uppercase letter. No flag juggling.
Quiet by default. fd skips hidden files and folders, and respects your .gitignore, out of the box. That means no more wading through .git/ noise or build artifacts.
Fast. fd uses parallelized directory traversal, so it plows through large trees much faster than the single-threaded find.

Getting started

Installing fd is simple:

Ubuntu / Debian: sudo apt install fd-find (the binary is named fdfind, because the name fd was already taken by another package)
macOS: brew install fd
From source (needs Rust 1.90+): cargo install fd-find

Once it's on your system, drop it straight into use:

fd PATTERN          # search the current directory
fd config -t f      # only regular files
fd config -t d      # only directories
fd config -t l      # only symbolic links
fd -g '*.rs'        # glob pattern instead of regex

The -t flag accepts the same file types you already know from ls: f for files, d for directories, and l for symlinks.

Chaining it with other tools

fd really shines when you pipe it into a command. Because it's built for automation, it supports null-delimited output, so filenames with spaces or weird characters don't break your pipeline:

fd -0 -e log | xargs -0 rm          # delete all .log files
fd -e jpg -0 | xargs -0 convert     # batch-process images
fd --exec echo {}                   # run a command per match

The -0 flag outputs filenames separated by null bytes, and xargs -0 consumes them safely — a cleaner replacement for find's -print0 incantation.

A note on the version

As of this writing, fd is at v10.5.0 (released August 26, 2026). Version 10.5.0 added options like --exact for whole-filename matching, while v10.4.0 had raised the minimum Rust version to 1.90. The project moves steadily — check the release notes for the latest.

Should you switch?

fd isn't a total find replacement — it deliberately leaves out some of find's exotic power. But for the 80% of everyday use cases, it's faster, friendlier, and far less error-prone. Try fd for a week alias'd over find; odds are you won't look back. Your fingers will thank you.