UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi Everyone!!!

Is there any command to move/copy set of files in a specific range.

Eg :
I have 800 text files in a directory
A1 ... A800

I would like to copy only files in range A40 ... A250.
I can acheive this using a "for" loop , but I guess there could be some command or Identifier ( with sed/grep/cp) which I can use to do this.
Can somebody help !!!

Regards
JR

how about:

Code:

for file in `perl -e 'for $n (40 .. 250) { print "A$n", "\n"; }'`; do echo moving file $file ... ; mv $file /somewhere/else/ ; done

Which shell you are using (exact version if possible)?

I Use ksh , I am able to acheive the desired output using a simple for loop.

for (( i = 40; i <= 250; i++ )) ; do ; cp A$i /var/tmp ; done

However my Mind wants some command (like sed..) to give the output. Im sure there could be some command which can replace the above for loop.

Thanks to all the gurus who responded !!

It seems you're using ksh93, so you may use brace expansion:

Code:

cp A{40..250} /var/tmp

Thanks .. The cp command works very well for bash, but is not working on ksh ..

Can you please help me with a ksh version of the command.

What version of the Korn shell you are using?
You said you use a loop like this (which implies ksh93):

Code:

for (( i = 40; i <= 250; i++ )) ...

but the brace expansion doesn't appear to work (ksh88, pdksh or other variant) ...

If you have the old ksh88 and you don't want to use external tools, you will need something like this:

Code:

cp A@([4-9][0-9]|[12]@(50|[0-4][0-9]))  /var/tmp