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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

>One reason I haven’t picked up any of these newfangled Rust tools like bat, exa, or fd is that I can barely remember the options for the originals.

But that's exactly the reason to use the newer tools -- they just make more sense -- especially fd over find. I've been using UNIX for over thirty years and find just never clicked with me.

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Confession; the only way I’ve ever actually used find is just a tree walker piping to grep to actually find whatever.

fd is probably better for most tasks, but sometimes it seems more cumbersome than find. E.g., to delete all files inside a cache directory, this is the simplest syntax I could find:

fd -t f -X rm {} \; ^ cache

Which makes me really nervous, so usually I fall back to using find:

find cache -type f -delete

Maybe this is foolproof for me only because I’ve been using find for decades. Is there a version of this for fd that inspires more confidence?

I would suggest

    fd -t f . cache -X rm --

Which reads as find "any file", "matching .", "in directory cache", then "execute rm -- followed by an argument list of all found files".

This ensures even if you have filenames starting with - they won't be interpreted as options for rm. For even more sanity of mind you may want to turn on -a for absolute paths, although I don't see an example right now where using relative paths would go wrong.

Yes, that looks safer. I didn't realize I could put the `-X` option at the end. The man page says:

Usage: fd [OPTIONS] [pattern] [path]...

So, I presumed the path had to go last.

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