Below is a code to customise search in Linux using find. find would recurse through all the directories. I needed to omit some directories which I knew didn't have the file I was looking for but instead have games. So recursing through them would cause enormous processor overhead and time loss. So I wrote a code in shell script to omit specific directories.. cd / for aa in `ls` do if [ "$aa" != "resident_evil" ] ; then if [ "$aa" != "usr1" ] ; then if [ "$aa" != "usr2" ] ; then if [ "$aa" != "usr3" ] ; then if [ "$aa" != "unreal" ] ; then if [ "$aa" != "quake3" ] ; then echo -e " Current search path: " cd $aa pwd find . -name "*.a" fi fi fi fi fi fi cd / done