When working with sequentially numbered files like P1080272.JPG through P1080283.JPG, you might need to copy only a specific range. The naive approach of listing each file individually is tedious, especially with large ranges.

In ZSH, you can use brace expansion for numeric ranges:

cp P10802{75..83}.JPG ~/Images/

This expands to all files from P1080275.JPG to P1080283.JPG.

For BASH users who need more control, a for loop works well:

for i in {75..83}; do cp P10802$i.JPG ~/Images/; done

To avoid errors when some files in the range might be missing:

for i in {75..83}; do 
    [ -f "P10802$i.JPG" ] && cp "P10802$i.JPG" ~/Images/
done

For more complex patterns, combine find with xargs:

find . -name 'P10802[7-8][0-9].JPG' -print0 | xargs -0 cp -t ~/Images/

For large numbers of files, using rsync can be more efficient:

rsync -av --include='P10802[7-8][0-9].JPG' --exclude='*' . ~/Images/

When working with sequentially numbered files in Linux/Unix systems, we often encounter situations where we need to copy a specific range of files. The standard cp command doesn't directly support numerical range selection in filenames, but we can achieve this through various shell techniques.

For consecutive numbering, brace expansion works well:

cp P10802{75..83}.JPG ~/Images/

For more complex ranges or patterns, combine seq with xargs:

seq 75 83 | xargs -I {} cp P10802{}.JPG ~/Images/

When dealing with non-sequential files or complex patterns, find becomes powerful:

find . -name 'P10802[7-8][0-9].JPG' -exec cp {} ~/Images/ \;

ZSH offers extended globbing features for more precise control:

# Enable extended globbing
setopt extendedglob

# Copy files 75-83
cp P10802<75-83>.JPG ~/Images/

For files with leading zeros or variable lengths, consider:

for i in {0075..0083}; do cp P1080"$i".JPG ~/Images/; done

When dealing with thousands of files, these methods show different performance characteristics. The xargs approach generally scales best for very large file sets.