OS X Terminal Recipes

Copy the first n files in a directory to a specified destination directory:

$ find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | head -1000 | xargs -I {} mv {} subs/01/

This script creates multiple sub directories, and copies n files to each sub directory:

for i in {1..20}
do
 echo $i
 mkdir $i
 find . -maxdepth 1 -type f | head -1000 | xargs -I {} mv {} $i/
done