You guys are great - thank you!

I hear you both re: the pre-planning, but actually I'm like the janitor here - housekeeping some shared directories where product photo is put into Dropbox by multiple users / employees etc. Images are placed in folders based on Vendor and sale name and then shared via the cloud. So these images could be buckshot all over the place & duplicated x-number of times as they might be needed in one folder for one particular sale and then some duplication to cover another sale with a different vendor and so forth. We have thousands of product SKUs and on this occasion these 300 are now sold out and we will not restock them so the task is to remove any photos that have the SKU number in the file name ... hence my conundrum and visit to this forum - which I am glad to have discovered!

I spend my day as the staff photographer but because I have some aptitude for computers I get the IT hat thrown at me on a regular basis. Hopefully this sheds some light on things

So a couple of things
1. I don't mind waiting for it to run - I can even run something overnight if it's going to take a very long time.

2. As the script finds and moves files, it would be great if there is no over-write of files with duplicate filenames, but rather if a duplicate filename is found that it just append the duplicate filename with something like copy, copy1, copy2, etc.
and ...

3. I understand this is a script and some of the things that I need to replace here - like path/to/targetdir ... but a few questions
a. what identifies the file that is the list of my "SKUs" (the search criteria)?
b. is my file with the list of SKUs a text file, one SKU per line? (probably yes)
c. in what way to I save this code and run it - I gather this is a script - what do I do with it (now I'm really showing my "dummy" status on this, but I learn fast so hang in there with me!).

Thank you again - I appreciate expanding my knowledge in this area and thank you all for your time.

Clyde