Shell Programming and Scripting

Alright, basically we're in the whole where we can't tar/gzip a folder since its to big so how do I copy files to a new folder for example

I got files from a-Z, i want to copy all files which starts with a A or a into another folder heres file structure

./backups/A
./backups/B
./backups/etc..
./files/* *wild card

Need to copy them all like that in their own folder (theres nearly 27 thousand files)

Then I need to copy files that have special characters like ".-_*%" <all the none numeric alpha characters including numbers into its own folder.
THEN I need to learn how gzip a folder "a.tar.gz","b.tar.gz" etc.. a complete folder.

I'm curious... in what way is it too big to tar/gzip? File size limitation on the output file? Or is the resulting file just too big and cumbersome to manage?

What OS exactly? The tar options and features vary widely depending on the OS.

Does it have to be tar? Sometimes cpio is more flexible.

Finally, what shell will you be scripting this in?

It's shared hosting, not sure what OS, but the hosting company is a POS.

But I managed to do the following:

cp [aA]* ../backups/A

How do I match numbers and other characters?

You can use an exclusion range, e.g.

Code:

cp [!A-Za-z0-9]* ../backups/nonalphanumeric

Thank you very much

Sorry, didn't quite answer the whole question, for numerics you can specify a range, e.g. cp [0-9]* ....

I just want to get the ones with numbers and other characters by them selves so this should work I think:

cp [!a-zA-Z]