Albert wrote: Midnight Commander? Umm, ok.. but then you have to sit there while all the work is being done :-) There may also be solutions which are even easier than the ones suggested so far.
We can access a file if we know what the file name is. It is therefore possible to manipulate (rm/cp/ls) any single file and possibly a number of files. Each image is 125x125 pixels named according to a numeric value indicating a number on a grid which in turn represents the world. These images contain some demographic information compiled from various sources within our company.
Are they strictly numeric filenames? Try something like for a in {0..9}{0..9}{0..9}; do mkdir <target>/$a mv $a* <target>/$a/ done This will create 1000 separate directories, eg. <target>/005/ etc, and move every file beginning with a specific combination of 3 numbers into a directory of that name, ie. 005* are all moved into <target>/005/. Each mv command will involve about 1000 files. If you cannot handle moving about 1000 files at a time, then add another set of numbers: "for a in {0..9}{0..9}{0..9}{0..9}; ...." which would produce 10,000 directories of 100 files each. If you do not want so many subdirectories in <target>, add another "for" layer. For example, for a in {0..9}{0..9}; do mkdir <target>/$a for b in {0..9}{0..9}; do mv $a$b* <target>/$a done done Now you get 100 directories with about 10,000 files in each, and move 100 files at a time. If that is too many files per directory, you can do all sorts of variants on this theme. This one will move 100 files at a time, and give you 100 directories containing 100 subdirectories, each containing approximately 100 files: for a in {0..9}{0..9}; do mkdir <target>/$a for b in {0..9}{0..9}; do mkdir <target>/$a/$b for c in {0..9}{0..9}; do mv $a$b$c* <target>/$a/$b done done done You may not be able to produce the exact file sorting you want with a command structure involving only "for" groups, but at least you will certainly be able to move them into a manageable tree structure, and then finish the work manually.