Specifying a range of files using regex - regex

Question

I have a huge amount of files (in the hundreds of thousands) that all have the same format of name.
The filename format is:
[prefix][number]suffix]
where the [prefix] and [suffix] of all the files is the same, and just the number part changes. The number part is something like 0004732
So the filenames are:
[prefix]004732[suffix]
[prefix]004733[suffix]
[prefix]004734[suffix]
etc.
I need to move a range of about 100,000 files (with consecutive numbers) to another directory, and I was wondering if it is possible to do this with a regular expression.

Answer 1

You're looking for character classes. It's a bit difficult to specify number ranges using regex because it works on text, not numbers, but it can be done something like this (for files 1-100):
prefix[0-1][0-9][0-9]suffix
prefix[0-1]\d\dsuffix #this also works in PERL regex
More complicated numbers get trickier. For 0-211:
prefix([0-1][0-9][0-9]|20[0-9]|21[0-1])suffix

Answer 2

If you're on Windows, install Cygwin, and do the following. If you're on Mac OS X or Linux, just open a terminal. You'll need to do the following:
ls PREFIX* | sed 's/PREFIX\(0[0-9]\)SUFFIX/mv & tmp\/PREFIX\1SUFFIX/' | sh
What is this doing?
Lists all files starting with the specified prefix
Pipes this list to sed, which uses a regex pattern to match only files that fall within the range you specify
Create a new string using the move command
Pipes the move command string to the shell (sh) and executes it
You can tweak the regex to match your number range by looking at the following:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/numericranges.html

Answer 3

To the best of my knowledge, there is no regex (to handle complex cases), but you can use loop easily:
The following code runs in linux. I ran simnilar code on Windows using CygWin and it works as well. Maybe there is similar way to do in Windows.
If the two numbers are with the same digits;
Example: from
[prefix]000012345[suffix]
to
[prefix]000056789[suffix]
:
for (( i=12345; i<56789; i++)); do mv "[prefix]0000$i[suffix]" /newDirectoryPath done
Otherwise you can do with multiple (usually two or three) commands;
Example: from
[prefix]000012345[suffix]
to
[prefix]003456789[suffix]
:
for (( i=12345; i<99999; i++)); do mv "[prefix]0000$i[suffix]" /newDirectoryPath done
for (( i=100000; i<999999; i++)); do mv "[prefix]000$i[suffix]" /newDirectoryPath done
for (( i=1000000; i<3456789; i++)); do mv "[prefix]00$i[suffix]" /newDirectoryPath done