To solve the increasingly prominent cost of traditional path lookup strategy in the Linux kernel, Staged Lookup was proposed to accelerate path lookup by dynamically caching hot directories to reduce file access latency.The essence of Staged Lookup lay in caching frequently used directory entries, thus avoiding the repetitive traversal of paths from the root node. Unlike the retrieval operations that start from the root node, Staged Lookup expanded the search strategy to allow for forward or backward path lookup from the most recently cached directory entry. A prototype of Staged Lookup was deployed on Linux kernel versions 3.14 and 5.4 and subjected to real system tests. Experimental data indicates that Staged Lookup can achieve performance improvements of up to 46.9% compared to traditional path lookup methods.