On my list of utility tools to install on a new system is fd, fd a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find. It’s written in Rust and is available on multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Installation on Windows

via Winget:

winget install sharkdp.fd

For the rest I’m going to blatantly copy from the [fd github page]((https://github.com/sharkdp/fd)

How to use

First, to get an overview of all available command line options, you can either run fd -h for a concise help message or fd --help for a more detailed version.

Simple search

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):

> fd netfl
Software/python/imdb-ratings/netflix-details.py

If called with just a single argument like this, fd searches the current directory recursively for any entries that contain the pattern netfl.

Command execution

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:

fd -e zip -x unzip

Deleting files

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:

> fd -H '^\.DS_Store$' -tf -X rm

If you are unsure, always call fd without -X rm first. Alternatively, use rms “interactive” option:

> 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.

Command-line options

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.