minifind

About

minifind is a minimal Unix find reimplementation in Rust, designed to list directory entries as fast as possible. Filename or path matching is supported via --name (glob) or --regex (regular expression) options, with optional case-insensitive matching controlled by --case-insensitive. Results can be narrowed further using --file-type to filter by entry type: b for block device, c for character device, d for directory, p for named FIFO, f for regular file, l for symlink, s for socket, or e for empty file/directory. Both --name and --regex accept multiple patterns.

By default, symlinks are not followed and filesystem boundaries are not crossed. The thread count defaults to the number of available CPU cores.

Related projects

Other notable projects in this space:

• sharkdp/fd — a much more fully-featured find alternative with excellent performance
• LyonSyonII/hunt-rs — a similar high-performance-oriented tool
• BurntSushi/ripgrep — also home to the globset and ignore crates used by this project
• uutils/findutils — a Rust reimplementation of findutils intended as a drop-in replacement

Usage

minimal find reimplementation

Usage: minifind [OPTIONS] <PATH>...

Arguments:
  <PATH>...  Paths to check for large directories

Options:
  -f, --follow-symlinks <FOLLOW_SYMLINKS>    Follow symlinks [default: false] [aliases: -L] [possible values: true, false]
  -o, --one-filesystem <ONE_FILESYSTEM>      Do not cross mount points [default: true] [aliases: --xdev] [possible values: true, false]
  -x, --threads <THREADS>                    Number of threads to use when calibrating and scanning [default: 20]
  -d, --max-depth <MAX_DEPTH>                Maximum depth to traverse
  -n, --name <NAME>                          Base of the file name matching globbing pattern
  -r, --regex <REGEX>                        File name (full path) matching regular expression pattern
  -i, --case-insensitive <CASE_INSENSITIVE>  Case-insensitive matching for globbing and regular expression patterns [default: false] [possible values: true, false]
  -t, --file-type <FILE_TYPE>                Filter matches by type. Also accepts 'b', 'c', 'd', 'p', 'f', 'l', 's' and 'e' aliases [default: directory file symlink]
                                             [possible values: empty, block-device, char-device, directory, pipe, file, symlink, socket]
  -h, --help                                 Print help
  -V, --version                              Print version

Regular expressions

The --regex option uses Rust regex syntax, which is similar to other engines but does not support look-around or backreferences.

Glob expressions

The --name option uses Unix-style glob syntax.

minifind vs GNU find

Hardware: 8-core Xeon E5-1630 with a 4-drive SATA RAID-10 array

Benchmark setup:

$ cat bench1.sh
#!/bin/dash
exec /usr/bin/find / -xdev

$ cat bench2.sh
#!/bin/dash
exec /usr/local/sbin/minifind /

Benchmark 1: ./bench1.sh
  Time (mean ± σ):      4.655 s ±  0.160 s    [User: 1.287 s, System: 3.366 s]
  Range (min … max):    4.525 s …  5.016 s    10 runs

Benchmark 2: ./bench2.sh
  Time (mean ± σ):      1.244 s ±  0.020 s    [User: 3.921 s, System: 5.908 s]
  Range (min … max):    1.199 s …  1.271 s    10 runs

Summary
  ./bench2.sh ran
    3.74 ± 0.14 times faster than ./bench1.sh