The vagabond butterflyfish has a whitish body which is marked with two series of thin dark diagonal lines perpendicular to each other, forming a chevron pattern.

The juveniles have a black dot on the soft-rayed part of their dorsal fin, near the posterior end.

It can tolerate a variety of environmental conditions, such as turbid waters and freshwater plumes in the vicinity of the mouths of streams.

[2] The vagabond butterflyfish was first formally described in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae.

The latter might be closer to the threadfin butterflyfish; as C. vagabundus has yielded abnormal mtDNA 12S rRNA sequence data this is hard to say however.