fd vs find vs ripgrep: I Created 10,000 Files to Settle This Debate
fd vs find vs ripgrep: I Created 10,000 Files to Settle This Debate TL;DR: fd is ~2.5x faster than find for filename searches, rg demolishes grep by ~3x for content searches, and find + grep combined lose on every single benchmark I ran. But there's a catch: both fd and rg skip hidden files by default, which can bite you if you're not paying attention. Here are the receipts. Why I Did This Every time someone posts a shell one-liner using find on Reddit, there's always that guy in the comments: "jUsT uSe fD, iT's fAsTeR." Then someone else chimes in with "actually ripgrep can do that too." I got tired of the anecdotes. I wanted numbers. Real ones. On real files. So I fired up WSL, generated 10,900 files across 1,506 directories (~143 MB of mixed content), and ran actual benchmarks with hyperfine . No synthetic microbenchmarks, no "I feel like X is faster" — just cold, hard terminal output. Methodology The Test Bed I created a directory at /tmp/fd-benchmark containing: Category Count Details Plain text files 2,000 file_*.txt — 20 bytes each, contains "test content line N" Binary files 2,000 data_*.bin — 15 bytes each Log files 1,500 match_*.log — contains unique "match_this_test_N" strings Config files 1,000 nested_file_*.cfg Nested dir files 1,000 level1_*/level2/level3/deep_*.txt + level1_*/shallow_*.txt Hidden root files 1,500 .hidden_* + .config_*.yml Hidden dir files 500 .hidden_dir/subdir/deep_hidden_*.txt Git objects 500 .git/objects/obj_* Multi-ext source files 800 src_*.{py,js,ts,rs,go,java,rb,php,cpp,h,css,html,json,xml,yaml,md} (50 each) Large binary files 100 large_*.dat — 1 MB each (random data) Total 10,900 $ du -sh . 143M . $ find . -type f | wc -l 10900 $ find . -type d | wc -l 1506 Tools Tested Tool Version What It Does find (GNU) 4.9.0 The OG. Ships with every Linux distro. fd 10.2.0 Rust-based find alternative. Smarter defaults, colored output. grep (GNU) 3.11 Content search. Also the OG. rg (ripgrep) 15.1.0 Rust-based grep alternative. Respects .gi