Copy files from a numeric range to another folder

You could just do

cp {14..39}.mp3 Volume2

But the for-loop is handy for other things:

for f in {14..39}.mp3; do cp "$f" Volume2; done

user55325

Posted 2012-07-17T02:42:50.283

Reputation: 4 693

for the above example this wouldn't work for ranges including numbers below 10. For those you could do something like cp 0{1..9}.mp3 {10..39}.mp3 Volume2 – georg – 2015-10-30T13:00:07.683

@georg It works fine for me, in bash version 4.3.42 - what shell are you using? – user55325 – 2015-11-22T03:06:46.557

@user55325 I have got the same bash version as you have. Testing it again tells me that my solution is stupitely complicated. Just test these commands: echo {1..10}, echo {01..10} and echo {1..010}. (Just to make it more explicit: I am talking about the leading zeros-issue.) – georg – 2015-11-23T08:17:21.047

Ah, I understand. Yes, {01..39} should produce the desired range in that case. – user55325 – 2015-11-23T17:22:20.917

Not homework, though I am an on again/off again student focusing on Linux Admin. – user98496 – 2012-07-17T02:53:11.943

Awesome. Will give cp {14..39}.mp3 Volume2 a try. – user98496 – 2012-07-17T02:56:08.367

1Just for completion: the for-loop will have N cp invocations where N is the number of songs, as compared to the single invocation of the first example. Fewer invocations means faster and less resource intensive (in this simple case it doesn't matter in practice, though). A caveat is that if the expanded list exceeds ARG_MAX-1 (check value with getconf ARG_MAX, it is much higher than 39-14) number of entries, it will fail. Utilities such as xargs and find can take care of this caveat by splitting on ARG_MAX. – Daniel Andersson – 2012-07-17T08:37:02.437

Copy files from a numeric range to another folder

Answers