I've got 291 numbered files (starting at 001 - title and ending at 291 - title) that need moved into separate directories. (001 to 021 to folder 1, 022 to 053 to folder 2, they aren't necessarily the same number of files each time).

I figured I could do it in a yucky way like this: ls | head -n 21 | sed -r 's|(.*)|mv \1 /path/to/folder1|' | sh

I'm almost positive there's a better way, so what would it be?

EDIT: So that would've worked fine, but I remembered...

I'm not stuck using a terminal, so I used a file manager to click and drag. Question still stands though.

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You want 21 subfolders in folder 1, and 22 folders in folder 2? – Daniel Beck Jan 19 at 20:04
Have you reviewed unix.SE? There's a good thread on this here: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/12976/… – chrisjlee Jan 19 at 20:32
@DanielBeck no, I want the files to move to each folder. There are a different number of files going to each folder. – Rob Jan 19 at 20:41
@ChrisJ.Lee That's pretty similar to what I was doing/have done before, I like it. Since the files match other files in another folder, I could ls -l | grep ^- | wc -l to get the numbers of lines. – Rob Jan 19 at 20:45
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@Rob Right. Still, different number of files into each directory. Automating that (including rules) is more effort than doing it yourself a few times. – Daniel Beck Jan 19 at 20:50
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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Since you said it's not always exactly 21 files than you need to move the files manually, and to do that effectively you could use brace expansion:

mv filename{001..21} dir1
mv filename{022..53} dir2
...
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This looks like it could work, I'll try it out. – Rob Jan 20 at 1:54
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This works perfectly, if you add a wildcard after the brackets. This is exactly what I needed. – Rob Jan 20 at 1:58
If the number is in the middle of the name, you can write file{001..21}name, you don't have to use wildcard. Anyway, happy it worked for you. – spatz Jan 20 at 14:47
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This will move the files as you described (except that the second range would be 022 to 042 for the second 21 files).

for ((i = 1; i <= 291; i++))
do
    ((d = (i - 1) / 21 + 1))
    printf -v file 'filename%03d' "$i"
    printf -v dir  'dirname%02d'  "$d"
    [[ -d "$d" ]] && mkdir "$d"
    mv "$f" "$d"
done
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It's not always 21 files, but thanks. – Rob Jan 19 at 20:36
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