find-all-files-matching-a-name-with-fd.md

Find All Files Matching A Name With fd

The fd command can be used to find files in your file system by name. Though it has some nice defaults—it excludes hidden directories and respects your .gitignore file—you may need to configure those.

For instance, I want to find ALL sitemap files in a monorepo.

$ fd -I -H sitemap.xml

The -I flag tells fd to not respect the .gitignore file. The -H flag says to include hidden directories in the recursive search.

This included a bit too much noise from the node_modules directory, so I want to exclude that.

$ fd -I -H -E node_modules sitemap.xml

The -E flag can specify one-off directories to exclude from the search.

I can even specify a regex to make sure I capture files that look like sitemap-01.xml, not just sitemap.xml.

$ fd -I -H -E node_modules 'sitemap.*.xml'

After familiarizing myself with a few flags, I'm able to take full advantage of fd.