I have a ton of screenshots on my desktop (it's the default location where they're saved) with titles of the form "Screen Shot 2020-10-11 at 7.08.12 PM.png" and I'd like to use a bash script with regex on the "Screen Shot" bit to move any such file from my desktop into a folder I created called "screenshots".
Right now, I'm playing around with find . -regex Screen*.*?.png but it's not quite working (it gives find: Screen Shot 2020-10-11 at 7.11.09 PM.png: unknown primary or operator).
I'm also not sure how I'd even use the output once it does find all the correct files to move them to a folder. Could you somehow iterate over all files in a folder using for i in seq 1 100 or something of the like?
You don't actually even need -regex here:
find . -type f -name 'Screen Shot*png' -maxdepth 1 -exec echo mv "{}" screenshots \;
You can run this command safely as it will not do anything but print
what it would do. Remove echo to actually run mv.
All options used are documented in man find but in short:
-type f will make find look only for files, not directories. This
is useful in case you have a directory that matches -name - we don't
want to touch it.
-maxdepth 1 will only look fire files in the same directory level -
it's very useful here because you might already have some files that
match the -name present in screenshots directory - we want to leave
them alone.
-name accepts shell pattern, not regex. We could of course use -regex here but I prefer -name because shell patterns are shorter and easier to use here.
{} is a placeholder that will be replaced will the name of found
file.
\; is a literal semicolon, escaped to prevent it from being
interpreted by shell that ends command specified with -exec.