>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.
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?
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.
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.