Find files by name in range using regex or name

Question

I have multiple screenshots since 2008 with name like "screenshot-2010-13-12.jpg". I need to copy screenshots since 2010 to 2019. I tried different options with -name and -regex , but cant find the way. The only success with regex is finding by format, nothing more.

Answer 1

If you want to be strict about the format something like this can do the work:

find . -name "screenshot-201[0-9]-??-??.jpg" -type f

This will search for files whose name starts with screenshot-201, then has a digit, then dash, two characters, dash, two characters and .jpg

Answer 2

To generalise to arbitrary range of dates, in zsh you could do:

cp screenshot-????-??-??.jpg(.e['
  [[ $REPLY >= screenshot-2010-02-12.jpg &&
     $REPLY <= screenshot-2019-09-21.jpg ]]']) /some/dir/

Or:

cp screenshot-????-??-??.jpg(.e['
  [[ ${REPLY//[^0-9]} = <20100212-20190921> ]]']) /some/dir/

To copy regular (with .) files in the 2010-02-12 to 2019-09-21 range for instance.

If they're not in the current working directory but you need to search for them in any level of subdirectories:

cp -i -- **/screenshot-????-??-??.jpg(.e['
  [[ $REPLY:t >= screenshot-2010-02-12.jpg &&
     $REPLY:t <= screenshot-2019-09-21.jpg ]]']) /some/dir/

(here adding -i to mitigate the risk in case several files with the same name are found in directories).