Find and copy files by file name

Question

Hey Gang,
I sure hope you guys can help me out. I'm looking for a piece of software that can read a txt file or spreadsheet to find specific files and copy them from one place to another.
In other words, I have a folder with 1000 files in numerical order from 1 to 1000. I need software that can copy only selected images (ie 4, 53, 244, 456, 999, etc...) to a separate folder.
Any Ideas?
-Chris

Answer 1

This is very simple to do with a script.
Let's assume that the files are in /Users/cnhoward/source and you want to move particular files to /Users/cnhoward/dest. Let's say you have a text file, numbers.txt, with one number on each line, and the files are named like 'file_X.txt' where 'X' is the number. Then you could do this in terminal:
for n in `cat numbers.txt`
do
cp /Users/cnhoward/source/file_${n}.txt /Users/cnhoward/dest
done
You don't give much in the way of details, but that should give you an idea to start from.