In bash, we can use a sequence expression to list files within a specific range. For example

$ echo file{18..21}.txt
file18.txt file19.txt file20.txt file21.txt

The sequence expression takes the form {x..y[..incr]}, where x and y are either integers or single characters, and incr, an optional increment, is an integer. It is part of Bash's brace expansion feature.

Ref:

• https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Brace-Expansion.html - documentation on Bash's brace expansion feature.
• https://superuser.com/questions/236484/list-files-numbered-in-a-specific-range - where I came across the above snippet. Dennis Williamson's reply is pretty comprehensive; provides alternatives solutions; addresses corner cases; high information density. It is worth reading it end to end.

Possible use cases:

• To list files

  ls file{18..21}.txt

• Use a for loop to run a command on each of them

  for file in file{18..21}.txt
  ...

tags | list file names with a range