Apple has a history of making choices for their users that tend towards simplicity over configurability. (Windows and Linux tend the other direction.) So it is with the paths searched by Spotlight. But you seem to be aware that there are ways to include /usr in your Spotlight index, right? I did it the manual way, and it works just fine. So when I search for "rsync", it will find /usr/bin/rsync. And when I search for "hosts" it will find /private/etc/hosts. Björn