How do I transfer multiple files with a common suffix and prefix using an offset?

Question

I have thousands of files whose names are of the form:

sequence_1_0001.hmf  
sequence_1_0002.hmf  
sequence_1_0003.hmf
...  

sequence_1_0001.jpg  
sequence_1_0002.jpg
sequence_1_0003.jpg
...  

sequence_2_0001.hmf  
sequence_2_0002.hmf  
sequence_2_0003.hmf
...  

etc..

I'm using sftp to transfer only the files whose suffix and prefix are 'sequence_1' and '.hmf', respectively. However, I don't want to transfer all the files that match this format. Instead, I want to transfer every hundreth file. That is:

sequence_2_0001.hmf  
sequence_2_0101.hmf  
sequence_2_0201.hmf
...  

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Your examples and description are inconsistent. Going by the list sequence_2_0001.hmf, sequence_2_0101.hmf, sequence_2_0201.hmf, …, you can use the ? wildcard to match any one character.

get sequence_2_??01.hmf

You can use character sets to match one file every 20 (for example). [02468] matches any one of the digits 0, 2, 4, 6 or 8.

get sequence_2_[02468]?01.hmf

Answer 2

You can generate the file list with something like this:

printf %s\\n sequence_[0-9]*.jpg | sort -t_ -k2n | sed -n '1~100p'