This is a series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides.
The find program searches a directory tree to find a file or group of files. It traverses the directory tree and reports all occurrences of a file matching the user’s specifications. The find program includes powerful searching capability. find is one of the oldest utilities in the UNIX ecosystem.
fd is a utility that searches for files in a directory hierarchy. It offers a number of notable improvements to the venerable find. fd is written in Rust.
Installation
fd is a popular utility so it’s included in some distro’s repositories. For example, it’s included in the Community Repository for Arch.
However, even if there’s a convenient package available in your distro, you may not be getting the latest version. Fortunately, manual installing is straightforward. At a shell, issue the following commands:
$ git clone https://github.com/sharkdp/fd.git
$ cd fd
$ cargo build
$ cargo install
$ cargo install --path
Cargo is the Rust package manager.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Excellent Utilities | |
|---|---|
| Abricotine | Markdown editor with inline preview functionality |
| AES Crypt | Encrypt files using the Advanced Encryption Standard |
| Ananicy | Shell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities |
| broot | Next gen tree explorer and customizable launcher |
| cheat.sh | Community driven unified cheat sheet |
| CopyQ | Advanced clipboard manager |
| croc | Securely transfer files and folders from the command-line |
| Deskreen | Live streaming your desktop to a web browser |
| duf | Disk usage utility with more polished presentation than the classic df |
| exa | A turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls command |
| Extension Manager | Browse, install and manage GNOME Shell Extensions |
| fd | Wonderful alternative to the venerable find |
| fkill | Kill processes quick and easy |
| fontpreview | Quickly search and preview fonts |
| horcrux | File splitter with encryption and redundancy |
| Kooha | Simple screen recorder |
| Imagine | A simple yet effective image optimization tool |
| LanguageTool | Style and grammar checker for 30+ languages |
| Liquid Prompt | Adaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh |
| lnav | Advanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshooting |
| lsd | Like exa, lsd is a turbo-charged alternative to ls |
| McFly | Navigate through your bash shell history |
| mdless | Formatted and highlighted view of Markdown files |
| OCRmyPDF | Add OCR text layer to scanned PDFs |
| Paperwork | Designed to simplify the management of your paperwork |
| PDF Mix Tool | Perform common editing operations on PDF files |
| peco | Simple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably useful |
| ripgrep | Recursively search directories for a regex pattern |
| scrcpy | Display and control Android devices |
| Sticky | Simulates the traditional “sticky note” style stationery on your desktop |
| tldr | Simplified and community-driven man pages |
| tmux | A terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflow |
| Tusk | An unofficial Evernote client with bags of potential |
| Ulauncher | Sublime application launcher |
| Watson | Track the time spent on projects |
| Whoogle Search | Self-hosted and privacy-focused metasearch engine |