A modern find command
Command Line – Modern Searching

© Photo by Warren on Unsplash
An update for the find command, fd offers significant improvements with many user-friendly options.
Linux has never lacked for search commands. Commands such as grep
and find
date back to the early days of Unix, and their options make for lengthy man pages. However, if such commands have a weakness, it would be their reliance on regular expressions, a pattern-matching system that is an art in itself, but one that fewer and fewer users today seem to have much fluency in. Because of this problem, the modern fd
command (aka fdfind
) [1] is an increasingly popular alternative to find
and already available in many distributions. It is not that fd
does not support regular expressions – in fact, it also supports Rust's Glob, as well as the use of both regular expressions and Glob in the same command. However, just as find
includes more user-friendly options than grep
, so fd
includes more than either of its older predecessors.
The basic command depends on the distribution. In Arch Linux, it is fd
, while Debian uses fdfind
. In either case, fd
is followed by options and a search string, as you would expect (Figure 1). Should you type incorrectly, the help is concise and to the point (Figure 2). Its output can include both file and directory names, different file types, and attributes, depending on the options chosen. Complete coverage of fd
's other options would be impractically long, let alone for the regex syntax or Glob, so I will provide a brief overview of the general categories available.
File Attribute Options
File modification times are one of the most useful ways to search. The modification times can be listed as:
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Kali Linux 2025.3 Released with New Hacking Tools
If you're a Kali Linux fan, you'll be glad to know that the third release of this famous pen-testing distribution is now available with updates for key components.
-
Zorin OS 18 Beta Available for Testing
The latest release from the team behind Zorin OS is ready for public testing, and it includes plenty of improvements to make it more powerful, user-friendly, and productive.
-
Fedora Linux 43 Beta Now Available for Testing
Fedora Linux 43 Beta ships with Gnome 49 and KDE Plasma 6.4 (and other goodies).
-
USB4 Maintainer Leaves Intel
Michael Jamet, one of the primary maintainers of USB4 and Thunderbolt drivers, has left Intel, leaving a gaping hole for the Linux community to deal with.
-
Budgie 10.9.3 Now Available
The latest version of this elegant and configurable Linux desktop aligns with changes in Gnome 49.
-
KDE Linux Alpha Available for Daring Users
It's official, KDE Linux has arrived, but it's not quite ready for prime time.
-
AMD Initiates Graphics Driver Updates for Linux Kernel 6.18
This new AMD update focuses on power management, display handling, and hardware support for Radeon GPUs.
-
AerynOS Alpha Release Available
With a choice of several desktop environments, AerynOS 2025.08 is almost ready to be your next operating system.
-
AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for more than two weeks.
-
RingReaper Malware Poses Danger to Linux Systems
A new kind of malware exploits modern Linux kernels for I/O operations.